Why Making “Selfish Decisions” Will Make You a Stronger Entrepreneur

0:0010 years ago, I made the decision to build my personal brand that was elevated, yet approachable, and reflected who I was, not just what I did. I created my website with ShowIt because it's true drag and drop freedom so you can easily build and update your site. Plus, their real human support team, game changer. Want to try it for yourself? Head to jasminestar.com forward slash show it for a 14-day free trial and first month free when you subscribe.

0:38I have a question for you. What steps are you taking to design your life? Well, just wait a minute. Don't quite answer that until you listen to this episode. Hi, my name is Katie. I'm the president of social curator. And in this episode, Jasmine is interviewed by Jennifer Camara, a life design partner who works with high achieving CEOs, founders, and artists to help them get unstuck, align their actions with their values and design meaningful lives. I think you're going to love their conversation. Jasmine's shares insights into her daily routines and decision-making techniques, and spills the tea on how she's able to fulfill her role as both the CEO of her company and be present for her family.

1:15Enjoy this episode. I'd love to start with inviting you in your own words to tell us a little bit about who is Jasmine today. Well, at the time of this recording, I'm a huge believer and subscriber in choosing a word for the year. And I believe without getting too woo-woo, it's like the word finds you, like you don't find the word. And so, so many of the past years, it has been like a trust or flourish or different things that I was like, my intention for the year was that very thing. And when I started 2023, the word of the year was rebirth. And so when you ask like, who are you today? I would be very honest and let you know, I'm still working on fully defining that.

1:53And if you were to ask me this 12 months ago, I think I would have an entirely different answer. It was very pointed. I knew exactly who I was and what I was doing. And I feel like the business has gotten to a place with a powerful team and that they have really said for the next opportunity, for you to be doing what you're doing now here inside of Social Curator, let us run the operations. You cast the vision and then also give yourself space to think what is next and how do we then iterate and how do we grow in both inside of Social Curator and then outside of like the bigger message, who you want to impact, who are you targeting?

2:26And I think that that has just been like the best gift that I could receive this year. So who am I right now? I'm in the process of discovery and I really want to own that process. And then I want to normalize the conversation because I think that as business owners, when you build really successful businesses or if you build audiences, there's this tendency to say like, no, we always have it together. We always know the direction. And I think I'm like, let's just have a conversation of, can we give ourselves the freedom, the luxury and the privilege of going through the discovery process and then bringing people with us?

2:49Oh my gosh. And thank you for opening the door to that. I love that. I feel like we're all works in progress and it's so great to see someone highlighting that today. It also does feel like such a gift from your team, right? To say, hey, Jasmine, we've got these operations. You take a step back, figure out the vision. How are you making space for that today? I wish it was something fancier, but it's really just saying, if I am not - Carving time, right? Carving time. And I think that when I look at a calendar or when I look at a series of things I need to do or tasks, I immediately think, well, I must do this.

3:20But then when you actually distill it down, I've just been asking myself, is it necessary? It has to be a 10 out of 10 necessary that I'm doing this. And the minute that I started releasing things that I really felt like, oh no, no, I'm the only person who could do this, I started realizing how powerful the team was and how ready and willing they were to like take the ball and run it down the field. And I had a mentor come in and say, if you believe your team can do what you're doing at 80 % of your capacity, then you must let it go. It is in your best interest. Like the way that you grow the team and the way that you grow the business is by empowering other people to do it.

3:53And you know, like outcomes, outside of like metrics and analytics, because outcomes are really suggestive, especially with what we do with social media. It's like a little bit more art than it is science. And as far as education, it's a little bit more art than it is science. And so here you have a team, and I'm like, far be it for me to have a subjective opinion on what is good or what is best or things that I can do when I've seen this team really take it and elevate it. And so I'm like, oh, you just got out of the way a little earlier, like they're doing great with it. Yeah. I've seen really the highest performing teams where it's about the CEO realizing that, oh man, I can actually allow the team to run with it and then use my time and energy to drive our bigger vision or focus or drive this new priority that we wanted to do forward anyway.

4:35And again, on this point, that is really tough to, I think the toughest part is staying focused, right? It's not adding more to our plate. It's - Subtracting. Really keeping the plate clean, figuring out what are the three most important drivers that we're focused on this quarter and what really ruthlessly prioritizing our activities to make sure that we're focused on them. And then for you, I imagine like you've been in the trenches with everyone and carving your own time to say, you know what, maybe I'm going to take time to think this morning or I'm going to go take time to explore this new venture or industry or whatnot.

5:10I'm sure that that feels not as natural for you to not be in the trenches with your team. And that also take some adjusting for yourself. Absolutely. And then the minute you get out of the trenches, and I mean, to be very clear, I'm still very aware of like the day-to-day of the business and having conversations on the regular about those things. But I think that what happened is like when you're able to step out of the trend, you're not even in the sky, you're just on the ground level. And you've just realized, wow, I can see things from a different vantage point. And when you see things at a different vantage point, you're then making very different decisions about what you thought the process or you thought the roadmap or you thought like iteration or growth or pivot were going to look.

5:47And I think that giving yourself this space allows you to really drill down on what it is you want to do. And so at the time of this recording, you know, I haven't actually, by the time this recording drops, I'm sure we will have like announced it. But, you know, I'm at a point in my life where we're in the middle of focusing on launching a second cohort, a mastermind. And I started a mastermind at the top of the year. I had such a phenomenal group of entrepreneurs. Like it blew my mind. I was definitely nervous. This was a big iteration. It was a high ticket offer for a small group of people.

6:19And what we accomplished in six months or what they accomplished in six months blew my mind. I was just like, I can't believe what a powerhouse group of women were focused on doing and having their transformation. So it seems like it makes the most sense for us to pick up the second six months of the year. Like obviously that's what one might do, especially if there's a demand and a wait list and promotional material. and I think that this has been a practice of if I was in the trenches, I might not hear my intuition or feel it as strongly. And I'm not a person who was like an subscriber of like my intuition guides me, but there was like a deep knowing.

6:52And I talked to my husband and I said, I think this is the craziest thing I'm about to tell you, but I don't know if doing the mastermind for cohort number two is in my highest interest. And then he like didn't blink an eye and he was just like, listen to that every time in the past that you just didn't take ownership and like for all intents and purposes i'll be very forthcoming it makes no sense it is such a powerful just revenue driver it gives me life i get to work with other people i get to see and like really get infringed and really successful businesses and see how they're doing i'm learning as a byproduct i'm leveraging my skill sets of like curating a powerful group of people holding space and accountability and then really driving with like tactical practical operational advice And so for so many reasons, it makes zero sense for me to say, I'm pretty sure I don't want to move forward with the mastermind anymore.

7:40And there's a part of me that's like worried. I'm like, oh, for the people who applied. And I said, wait, am I going to sit in worry or am I going to speak my truth? I would rather have somebody have an opinion about me speaking my truth than sit in a state of like, I wonder what they're going to say. I'd rather I'm going to be planning on sending personal emails to everybody who applied and just simply explain that I am making the somewhat difficult business decision to say, I know this doesn't make sense, but I am really believing that the face that I carve out for the time that I would be investing in the mastermind, I'm going to be using it to create something that is like in me.

8:09And I keep on tapping on it, but I'm not quite sure what it is. And I just need the time and space to build, create and ideate and then actually think of a successful launch plan thereafter. Yeah. And Jasmine, that also feels like such a natural aspect of growth, what you're describing, because this mastermind was so impactful for you, for the attendees. You were driving so much value here, but it sounds like you're evolving and your time, your energy, your vision is expanding beyond that. And you need to, and you're honoring making space for that. So thanks for modeling that for folks. I think it's really important.

8:42Well, I don't know if we actually break down the exact definition of model. I don't know. And correct me if I'm wrong. A model is something that you might look at and then build other things on the back of it. So if I think of like a 3D modeling, if I wanted to make like a toy truck, like we look at the model and we tell this to the 3D machine, like please replicate the model. And yet in the processes, I don't really think that I am the model. I just think that I'm in the process. I feel like I'm being still shaped to it. And so I really would love to have that conversation. It's like we could talk about being in like the suck of being modeled and maybe not being the model.

9:13And then maybe in a future conversation, we come back and be like, so let me talk to you about the model. But at a state of completion, we might be able to look back. But right now I'm just in the middle of it and I'd rather really own that conversation. That's such a great call out. So when I think you are modeling something, why I use that word here is because to me, what you described is you are modeling, you honoring the fact that your vision has changed and the fact that to you, spending time on this mastermind isn't to you living to your highest potential. This isn't the greatest leverage slash impact you could be having right now.

9:50And that is a really tough business decision. There are people you might be letting down. You're going to need to send all these letters. To your point, you've literally said this, it makes zero sense to someone who might be looking at it from the outside. However, the most important person I would argue here is Jasmine because this is Jasmine's life. Jasmine has been building to fulfill and live up to her vision of what she wants to build. It's also what you inspire other entrepreneurs to do, Jasmine, as a speaker, as you've been sharing, live up to your fullest potential. And so when I say model here, it's you are modeling, making that hard choice because it's never an easy choice.

10:31It feels risky. I could hear the emotion in your voice as you were describing. And it takes courage and bravery to take that path. It's always easy to do whatever you've been doing before, whatever pleases others. And I love that you are owning up to the conversation because I think we need more examples of folks who make those hard choices and stand up for themselves and what they want to build. Well, thank you. In that regard, with that clarification, I will step into being a model, being a model of making a decision. Yeah, and making a decision that might not make sense to other people. And on the backside of it, you had said the person who the most to is yourself.

11:03And I think that sometimes I connotate making a decision on behalf of myself as a selfish decision. And yet my husband's like, no, no, it is the greatest decision. Because when you are in a good place, the business is in a good place. And when you are in a good place, the family is in a good place. And so reframing what it means to make a decision on behalf of myself isn't selfish, but actually selfless in a way. And it sounds like you're in the process of that reframing. Absolutely. Where do you feel you got this notion of making a decision that energizes me is selfish? It's very common among women in particular too.

11:40I did a lot of work with my recent therapist. We've been working together now about a year. I'm obsessed with her. I love her. I want to be her friend in real life, but we know that's totally unprofessional. I mean, I'm all of this stuff. I just am like, oh, hang out on the weekend. Can I be your best friend? Your best one that you see? We're going to do another session on that topic. No, you know, we kind of went down birth order. So I do have a twin sister. I'm a fraternal twin. I'm a minute older. But I have definitely embodied the older sister, the oldest child. And so I think that not my parents never put it on me.

12:16I think it was just something that just happened in the family. I took a lot of responsibility. A traditional Latino family, five children, and we were homeschooled. So we spent a lot of time in the home. And so we took on a lot of responsibility for like household items. And even when I went to college, my sister and I, we made a collective decision as a family that whatever school offered us the most scholarship money would be the school that we went to. And so we applied for a lot of scholarships and like Pell Grants and Kell Grants. And the school that gave both my sister and I the highest tuition actually ended up being the same school.

12:47So we ended up going to college together having swore, you're never going to go to college together. We ended up going to college together. and on the byproduct of that when my mom was first diagnosed with cancer she actually had a relapse when i was in law school so she was first diagnosed i was a junior in college and so it really changed the dynamic of what i was doing in school and i then really heavily stepped into going back home a lot to do like meal prep and to do laundry and tell my mom my mom was dead right in and so i think that what happens is i never thought i was being selfish or unselfish i just took a lot of responsibility.

13:20But what subconsciously I was digesting it on is like, well, if I choose myself, then I'm not choosing them. And I think that through a lot of therapy and deep work, it has been, well, when I choose myself, I am choosing them. And so I think that that realization and distillation has probably been really recent, probably in the last 12 months. Yeah. And thank you for sharing. It's extremely common. I also relate a lot to your story. I myself am an immigrant. I grew up in poverty. There is a lot of, especially with families, where I have this huge value of team and family that we stand together and we take care of each other.

13:56And so I totally get that. What I'd bring up here is to this point of you, in this case, choosing, and you've come, you've developed enough stability for yourself. I think it's tougher when you need to develop like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We all need food. We need shelter. And I think in these cases, you want to get to a point where you have food, you have shelter, things like that. But once you get to a certain level of stability, it's also about what drives you and what energizes you and how is you showing up in your best self in effect, caring for the others in your life. So what your husband brought up of, if Jasmine is fully fulfilled and energized and excited, what does that do for the team?

14:38And then we also had a conversation with you, maybe making time for yourself to work and being a mom and maybe feeling a little guilty. But what is that modeling? And again, modeling not necessarily as a supermodel or whatever, but modeling as I'm showing an example of this act. And maybe I am rewriting prior narratives of this being selfish to when I take care of myself, I feel powerful, I feel strong, and I can show up more energized and with even more in my cup to pour into your own. And what impact does that begin to have in exploring these paths? That was great. Well, it was just a perfect distillation.

15:18It was just a really great summary. And I think that if that clip ended up just being like a piece of content for yourself, I think you just won the game. Like it was just exactly that. It's a complete distillation of somebody stepping into the power of modeling a decision without being the end result. And then allowing yourself and then telling yourself that when you are energized, you energize others. Yeah. And we've all, like, I think at least my parents' generation, my mom made a lot of sacrifices, quote unquote, for our family. And it's like stuff we've seen a lot. And I think it's all about rewriting these paths and taking care of ourselves is taking care of others and all of that.

15:55So this is a work in progress. We're all on it. On the notion of being this work in progress and you being this example, Jasmine, I have a couple of questions. I wanted to talk today about entrepreneurship and then your life design. You had mentioned that at each turn, you were uneducated, unfunded, unqualified, and unprepared to start this venture in entrepreneurship. Be it you quitting UCLA to do photography without a camera yet, or then becoming an internationally recognized photographer to starting to advise other entrepreneurs to then in 2020, not having any tech experience to then launching a tech company.

16:30I think so much of the time we maybe hesitate or stop because we feel we don't know enough or we don't have funding or access. And so I'd love to talk about what in those moments drove you forward and maybe a couple of stories that others can take an example. Yeah, I don't know if it's being a visionary or a sheer idiocy. Or is it a fire in your belly, Jasmine? Maybe it's a mix. I don't ever believe in absolutes. So it's somewhere like a mix. And I'd probably add a dash of, you know, divine brilliant. It's like, it's odd that somebody might look at something and think on the back of nothing. I think I can do that.

17:09I think I can do that. And every step of the way, it was just, what was it? Like a desperation as the mother of innovation? I'm kind of like... Yeah, yeah. Necessity as the mother of invention. Okay. See, it's like, I just make it up. I will say, maybe that's my only quote. I want to trade my own quote. I love it. I think that with every business generation, I didn't set out and say, you know what? I need to shake things up. I really need to do things I'm wildly unqualified to do. Not at all. It was simply like, how do I solve the next problem? And then on the back of solving the next problem, I realized that if I shared the journey, if I documented the journey, it actually opened up pathways to create a different offer when I found an audience who was struggling or wanted to know how to move past or solve or get through a very similar thing.

17:50Every business I have ever created has been on the back of getting through a seemingly impossible thing and then breaking through the other thing and then, you know, new levels, new devils. It's, well, if I continuously iterate and then I share the process and the journey, then the next offer seems to just come in and of itself. So yes, every step of the way, I've been unqualified and unfunded and uneducated. And when I think about like whatever the future version is, like when I think about that, I think that's ridiculous. Like that's ridiculous. I don't even know if that's going to happen. But then I look at the past as an indication of the future.

18:27And if I were to just deal with facts, only facts, if I were to remove all emotion and simply say, you have a track record of being unqualified, unfunded, unconnected, and then finding a way to make it work. So when you look to the future and you think that that is the most ridiculous idea and whether or not you have the skill set now to accomplish what it is you want to do, well, why not step into it and act as if the destination has been reaped. What decisions are you making today? How are you showing up? What are you doing? And then holding space for the future vision and then making decisions against the future vision that requires this high level of faith.

19:02Like I know that's the thing that JD and I want to build. What decisions do we need to make today to build that? And so I'm not making decisions against the business now. I'm making decisions against the business in the future, which again is a little bit crazy, a little bit brilliant, a little idiotic, a little visionary. And yet that's the way we've always functioned. And so I'm like, well, that ain't broke. Don't fix it. And so that's where we're at right now. Yeah. You say a little crazy, a little idiotic, but I will share because you, for instance, the story of you starting social curator and not having a technical background.

19:37And you shared that you sat with these engineers who were creating your first MVP that you were going to test and you just felt so out of place. You felt like a fish out of water. But despite that, you pushed yourself to ask questions, ask basic questions, ask quote unquote stupid questions, questions about your questions. And so I want to highlight that because I think it's not just having a crazy vision, but I think what really propels you forward, Jasmine, is the fact that despite that vision that maybe scares you in your pants, you are still going for it and you are showing up each day. And I think you mentioned this too.

20:16It's the little small things you do every day and the consistency with it and the to come up, come and show up and be brave and ask the questions and move forward. And now here you are today, a tech. Are you familiar with human design at all? What do you, I think so, but what in particular? It's like a practice of self-discovery and you kind of learn, how do you make decisions and what are the things that you're doing? and there's like, I believe like five types of people. Anyway, it's neither here nor there. But as I was working through understanding a little bit more about how I make decisions, because if we understand how we make decisions, the body will start giving us cues.

20:52Like perhaps we're highly logical. Well, then if we had the ability to highly logically lay something up, the decision then lends itself to this. If we find that we're highly intuitive and we kept on squashing this idea that intuition can actually help us make a decision, that when you learn that that's actually a decision source place, that you might be leaning more on your intuition. Well, it was going through the process of me figuring out how do I best make decisions? And one of the things that really came out from that was energetically. I know it is the right decision when I feel energetic toward it.

21:21And so if we go back to this idea of it makes no sense to close this mastermind, I felt very energetic towards cohort two of it. I felt energetic. However, when given the opportunity, the team and I were ideating on something, we just started tapping around on this idea. All of a sudden I was like, and it wasn't a shiny object syndrome because I sat with it for a while. And instead of me coming like, oh, well, this or, oh, well, that, the more ideas came. And I said, and then we could do this and then we could do that. And then, oh, there's this. And all of a sudden, I just felt like it was energy that bred energy.

21:50So yes, it made a decision of like, oh, well, that doesn't really make sense. But I'm like, if I know my decision-making process is by getting energy from something that I just need to trust myself and like lean more into that. And then as I've just really been going down and creating core values for your business is one thing. I had never taken the time to actually create like what's my value system and one of the things that you had said is like making courageous decisions and hearing that now that I went through I have two main values and one of them is one of them is courage but I can't say at the end of my life oh I wanted to be courageous without accepting that what it takes for us to be courageous is to be in really difficult situations and make a decision that few people do and so when you say oh you're like making those courageous decisions, I was like, oh my God, somebody else is seeing me live according to my values.

22:39And so, so often as entrepreneurs, we really want to set values for the business as we all should. How often are we just making them for ourselves? And when somebody else sees the value from the outside, then you know, oh, I'm doing the thing. I'm living the way that I should. So thank you. And I wanted to share that just to kind of like x-ray anybody just really doing the work to figure out like how they make decisions and then what is their values and applying it not not just in their business, but in their life. That's actually something that is incredibly important. I believe that the best performing and over long-term best performing leaders are ones who are acting in alignment with their personal values.

23:18And so it's been extremely clear, Jasmine, that here in that tough, brave decision you're making, you are living to your value there. And so, yes, it's abundantly clear and it's so refreshing and lovely to see. highly also recommend everyone i think you can take 45 minutes it takes to figure out what your own personal values are i've done a pod on how to figure out your personal values you can check that out and i hadn't heard about this these ways of decision making so there's energetic intellectual gut like i want to learn more about this so this is really interesting on the notion of our minds haven't evolved to the same extent as the rest of our bodies and so making a gut decision is actually not a statement.