14 Life Lessons I Wish I Knew Earlier

Lessons Learned from College

• You learn by assuming that you’re dumber than everyone else
  • In college, it was all about showing off how smart you were, but you don’t learn much that way
  • Talking too much prevents you from learning
  • It’s better to assume others know more than you and listen
  “You make better decisions and you learn more by assuming that you’re dumber than everyone else.”
• If you want to learn, don’t talk
  • Talking prevents learning
  “Fundamentally you can’t learn if you’re talking and so if you’re trying to learn then not talk.”

Lessons from Misrepresenting Yourself

• The hardest respect to earn is your own
  • The speaker had a bad reputation because of drinking and promiscuity; felt ashamed but didn’t change
  • Father suggested to stop being a “piece of [expletive]”
  • The speaker started trying to behave in a more respectable manner, ultimately learning to respect himself first before earning others’ respect
  “The hardest respect to earn is one’s own.”

Equipping people with language

• To market your business, you need to equip people with the words to describe what you offer
• Give people simple language to communicate what you do
• Otherwise, if you can’t even figure out how to describe your business, how do you expect others to understand it?
• At acquisition.com, the mission was to document and share the best practices of building world-class companies
• But most people don’t know what that means.
• The language may shift to “make real business education available to everyone”

“Equipping people with simple language so they can communicate what you do”

Reading and learning

• Reading is important to gain knowledge
• But not all books are worth reading multiple times.
• Many books written today are for money, notoriety, or to sell other things.
• Books that are older tend to be better because they were written with a different intention.
• The intent of older books were to transmit knowledge to the next generation, so they tend to be better in quality.
• For books that are worth reading, read them multiple times until you can teach the concepts of the book.
• You’ll get more out of reading one great book five times than reading five mediocre books.

“If your behaviour doesn’t change as a result of reading a book and it means you’ve learned nothing”

Champions focus on singular object

• Most Champions are able to become successful because of their thought processes.
• They allocate their time differently and have sacrificed more than others to get where they are.
• They are more ruthless with their time and have less patience with people who do not have the same level of ambition as them.
• Most Champions have a singular focus and are willing to eliminate things that distract them from achieving their goal.
• They say no to everything else except for their passion.

“What most Champions have is singular focus”

Goodwill is important for success

• Goodwill refers to positive sentiment and having some influence over a person’s behaviour.
• Goodwill compounds faster than money.
• Having goodwill can lead to more opportunities than having money.

Goodwill and Compounding

• Goodwill is based on audiences and compounding it can be faster than compounding money.
• Building an audience is a tax-free compounding vehicle that can be translated into money at a later stage.
• It’s more beneficial to focus on building an audience than making money moves today because building an audience means the potential for much higher compounding growth.

“Goodwill because it’s based on audiences and humans can compound significantly faster than money can and when I realized that that Goodwill could be translated into money if I so desired at a future date then I realized and rather than focusing on the money that I’m trying to make today, water, and I focus on the compounding vehicle that compounds at a much faster rate than money does that compounds tax-free by the way”

Insignificant Opinions

• Other people’s opinions on what we should do with our lives should be given very little weight unless the person has a vested interest in seeing us succeed and the context to provide the advice.
• Most of the time, it’s as simple as ignoring other people’s opinions because they are just projecting their own beliefs and experiences onto us.
• If we don’t like the life they have, then it’s not worth listening to their opinions.

“how much credibility or weight should we give to other people’s opinions on what we should do with our lives in my opinion, very little unless the person has a vested interest in seeing you succeed, and the context to provide the advice most of the time, it’s just worth ignoring because they’re trying to live their own life, and they’re projecting their own beliefs and experiences on you”

Extraordinary Commitments

• Extraordinary accomplishments come from doing ordinary things for extraordinary periods of time.
• Committing to an action for a long time is what compounds itself and makes the action extraordinary.
• The dedication to doing the action repeatedly is what makes someone extraordinary.

“the thing that makes the action extraordinary is the commitment to it, not the nature of the action itself, working out and doing reps is not extraordinary if you saw one set of a workout from me at the gym, you wouldn’t think, oh, this guy is amazing, look at them quads, it’s the fact that you do it for 23 years is what compounds on itself” (537)

Worth Doing Well

• If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
• It is essential to commit the time to do something well rather than doing something poorly.
• Doing something well means it is worth doing, while doing something halfway is not worth it.

Prioritizing tasks

• The speaker reflects on how he used to do many things that were not worth doing well since he didn’t have time to do them properly.
• He suggests that one should understand what problem they are solving, what they are hoping to achieve, and whether the task is worth doing well.
• By doing so, one can prioritize tasks that will make them the most money and get them closer to their goals.

“Because if it is worth doing, then I have to understand that to do it well, it’s going to take this much time. Now, given that, is it still worth doing? And if it passes that test of being worth doing in the long haul and because it is worth doing, worth doing well, then it gives us this lens through which to see the activities we do, so that we can prioritize the things that will make us the most money, or are going to get us closer to the goals that we have…”

Negotiation and values

• The speaker talks about the importance of being willing to negotiate everything except for one’s values.
• He explains that virtually everything is negotiable and suggests that people present with their best guess, hoping that someone takes them by the hand and helps them figure out a better solution.
• Negotiation should not be a zero-sum game, and it’s possible to find ways where both parties get better than they were before.
• It’s important to balance both one’s needs today and in 10 years with the needs of the other party.
• Negotiation should not compromise one’s values.

“You want to negotiate everything except for your values… I negotiated everything in that second example, including my values, because I was doing business in a way that was contrary to the values that I wanted to espouse, wanted to embody…”

Humility

• The speaker discusses the importance of humility and how he has heard people say that it’s stupid.
• He argues that defining terms is important since humility is not about thinking less of oneself.

“Humility, this is a big one because I want to be a different voice on this because I have heard all over the internet recently people saying humility is stupid. If you looked up what the word means, you wouldn’t want to be it because if you look it up on Google, it says thinking less of oneself. This is why looking and defining terms is important.” Humility and giving to the group

• The definition of humility is not decreasing your regard for self but increasing your regard for others.
• Giving more to the group than you get is the way to gain status.
• The group rewards the person who gives to the group.
• People who take from the group to get status end up getting banished by the group.
• Giving status and serving others increases your regard for others.

“If you want to gain status, the way you do it is by sacrificing more for the group than everyone else does. If you want to gain status in a company, you give more to the company than anyone else does, more than the company gives you back. Because what do they do? They reward that behavior.”

The happy man and the sad man

• The happy man has a thousand wishes, while the sad man has one.
• People often turn to short-term solutions to feel better when they are sad.
• The focus should be on doing things to make progress, not just feeling better.
• Accepting where you are and focusing on doing things can help you make progress.

“When you are sad, you want to not be sad. That’s the main focus, you want to feel better. And many times, people will take the short-term way of getting out of that, which is alcohol, drugs, etc., because in the moment, they can feel better. Everyone just wants to feel better. And so when I think about things that I used to think people were wronging me, right, you know, get all angry and I’d spin myself out, I use a different frame now, which is they just wanted to feel better. Do you think it had nothing to do with me, and they just wanted to feel better about themselves?” Taking Action Amid Fear

• Fear often prevents people from taking action towards their goals.
• The fear of what others will think can be especially paralyzing.
• Over time, it’s important to recognize that people are not thinking about us as much as we think they are.
• Taking action despite fear is essential in achieving success.

“Give me the strength to do some of the things we have done but I wouldn’t have been able to ever start on this path because I was paralyzed about what I thought other people were going to think about me only to realize that they weren’t thinking about me at all.”

The Entrepreneurial Cycle

• Failure is an important part of the learning process.
• Learning leads to success, but success can lead to complacency.
• Complacency can lead to failure, and the cycle starts over.
• Entrepreneurship is not a destination, it is cyclical.
• There are seasons of growth and seasons of learning.
• When the business is not growing, the entrepreneur should focus on learning to overcome the obstacles.

“Failure leads to learning, learning leads to success, success leads to complacency, complacency leads to failure.”

“Entrepreneurship in terms of Seasons because there are Cycles where you learn a lot…until I learned the lesson that I’m supposed to learn the business will cease to grow.”

Framing Success and Failure

• It’s important to recognize that success and failure are not inherently good or bad.
• Failure is an opportunity to learn and grow.
• Success can lead to complacency if not approached with the right mindset.
• Framing success and failure in a positive light can help reduce judgment and depression surrounding achievements.

“Either way they lead to my success and framing it that way took a lot of the judgment and the label and the depression around not achievement away from me.”

Shedding False Truths

• Many people are shaped by false truths that they have been told throughout their lives.
• Shedding these false truths is an important part of the entrepreneurial journey.
• The goal is to have a more accurate view of reality.
• Ignorance tax and ignorance debt are concepts that can help in this process.

“Much of the path of Entrepreneurship in my opinion is shedding these false truths so that you can see the world more clearly.” (1154)

“Imagine trying to hit a target with a blindfold on…simply because he sees the Target and he sees all the environment around it more clearly than you do.”

“The whole concept of ignorance tax and ignorance debt has been one that I have taken with me for life.” Debt Service for Reality

• Willingness to pay any amount of money to see the world more clearly in a true way
• Learning from someone who is better at the game of business than oneself
• Observing to see the realities that one may have missed
• Ego should be kept aside while learning from a better person in some way
• Quote: “You can learn from everyone if they’re making more money than you”

“Taking my ego hat off and saying like I’m the student here, this guy’s better in some way what does he believe to be true about the world I don’t or what do I believe to be true that isn’t and simply trying to observe to see those realities is something that I will always pay for”