#56 - The Recession Proof Skill Sets

Alright, it's 10:30 AM in San Francisco. I'm by myself in the studio because Sean wants to be with his newborn baby because he's a little nervous about this whole corona thing. He doesn't want to be out walking around. Don't blame him. And I don't feel like talking about business opportunities right now. I stayed up late last night monitoring this whole corona thing, the stock market. It's scary. It's a scary time. I don't know what the reality is going to be, how it's going to shake out, but it definitely— it's not a normal day, and I don't want to talk about normal stuff today because of that. And so I stayed up last night and I came up with a list of 4 skill sets that I've developed in the last 10 or 15 years, maybe longer, 20 years, uh, since I started scheming, since I started trying to create businesses. And I want to talk about those today because in a way they're kind of like— I kind of think of them as my rock, my recession-proof skill sets. And these things that I'm gonna tell you have really changed my life. And I think that if people use them, they're gonna be impossible to stop. I think that you're gonna be able to make a living no matter what. And I'm gonna spend some time talking about these four, these four things that I've learned throughout the years. And I'm gonna riff a little bit on 'em. I'm gonna tell you the resources that I think you can turn to. Most of all of 'em are free or they're cheap books that you can go and acquire and read. And I think it makes a huge difference. And everything that I'm about to talk about, I've stolen from people that are smart. A lot more successful than I am, that's for sure. And my perspective I think is a little bit interesting in that we have this event called HustleCon and I've hosted about 5 or 6 of them at this point. And throughout the years we've probably have had, I mean, we could have had 40,000 attendees throughout our events. And so we do HustleCon and we do all these other events. And because I do these events, I get to have all these really powerful and interesting people come and speak, but about an hour— I tell everyone to show up a little bit early, so I get to spend about an hour with them ahead of time, typically privately or with just two of the other speakers, like maybe the one who just spoke and the one who will speak. And I'm able to ask them pretty intimate questions because that's what I do. I, I like to get the nitty-gritty. And so my insight is coming from these people, and I'm talking about like folks who have started these really huge companies or who have accomplished really interesting or amazing things. And it's not just about money, but they're definitely successful if that's how you want to define success. But more importantly, they're successful in terms of just turning dreams into reality. And that's really what I think that this whole business thing is about, which is about dreams into reality. How do you take ideas and how do you shape the world according to those ideas. And it sounds fluffy, but I'm telling you, this shit is really important. And so that's what I'm going to talk about today. Some of these are skills, some of these are mindsets, mindset frameworks, or whatever you want to call it. And so I'm going to talk about these 4, and I'm going to, I'm going to go through them relatively quickly, but I'm going to add details and stories where I think it's effective. So let's get into it. I've got my notes here. I'm gonna be— I just jotted these down in the last, uh, few hours, so we're gonna go through them. Okay, the first thing that I've learned that's been incredibly effective, and these aren't in order, but this might be the most effective, which is controlling your emotions. And this sounds like some generic advice, but I'm going to walk you through it. We have a lot of companies work out of our office because we got a lot of space here and we When I started my business, someone let me work out of their office for free. And so we try to kind of do repay that, that, that favor to other people just getting going. And I always meet these really smart people, people who worked at McKinsey or went to Stanford and did all this amazing stuff. And on paper they're perfect and they're so smart. And I always tell them the same thing, which is this is not an intellectual game. This is an emotional game. Starting a business that is very successful financially, intellectually, it's very easy. Now, maybe being like Elon Musk and starting a company where you send a rocket to Mars. Yeah, that requires a lot of intelligence. But for a lot of companies, like it could be like WeWork or Instacart, these things that are— or Uber, these things that are really large, they're very simple concepts and they're not that hard to execute. But what's really hard is controlling your emotions. That's, that, that, that's incredibly challenging. And what I've learned throughout the years through paying a lot of money for therapy and coaching and reading, is that the majority of, of both good and bad behavior that you have now, it started back in childhood. And so what I tell people and what I've learned and what I tell myself is if you just study your childhood, you're going to learn a lot about why you are reacting to certain things. I remember being a kid, I was only 4 or 5 years old, and this is just an example of how things that happen when you're a kid, a lot of times you don't even realize it, but it actually sticks with you. I remember when I was a kid and I was at a— we were at like a bar or restaurant or something with my family and my father was drinking, it must have been like a Jack and Coke or something. And I remember he ordered this glass and I saw him get the straw and take it out. And I was like, why are you doing that, Dad? I was a little kid. And he goes— and he just made some comment, no big deal. He's like, oh, men don't drink with straws. And he didn't even think twice. He was just joking, or I don't know, he just said that because he meant like— he was saying like men don't use like dainty straws when they're drinking alcoholic drinks. And my whole life I never used a straw. And it wasn't until I was older when I realized, oh, he was— first of all, he was just— he just made some offhanded comment. He didn't even think about it. And second of all, he was referring to alcohol. And so for my whole life, when I went to McDonald's or a fast food restaurant as a kid, I would never— I would always pull the straw out of the drink. And that's an example of how little things happen when you're young, and sometimes you notice them and sometimes you don't, but they entirely shape how you behave as an adult. And I think it's very important to study your childhood and to study how you are raised, trauma that happened when you were young, because as you grow a company, all of those, all of those things that, that happened to you, they become magnified. So good things and bad things, both 10x as you get more people and as you get a little bit more successful. And the way you react to things, the way you gauge risk, the way that you react to people doing what you said or them not doing what you said, the way you trust people, A lot of that stems from how you were raised and things that happened to you as a kid. And so what I do is I, I have a therapist, so I've gone to therapy every week for maybe 10 years, and I've had to work through a lot of interesting things. But I think it's quite common that people have the same issues that I have, but going to therapy is incredibly important, or at least it has been for me. And the other thing that I did is I have a CEO coach that has helped a ton. It's pretty much like therapy, but it's all related to your job. But like, you really talk about all types of relationships, girlfriends, wives, boyfriends, husbands, father, mother. I mean, you talk about all this stuff, coworkers. And so that has been incredibly helpful for me. And so the things that have made a massive impact, the resources that have made a massive impact are I use Torch. So torch.io, that's my That's my coach. We pay him, uh, his name's Peter. We pay him a monthly fee and myself and Adam, the president of our company, go to him and it's been wonderful. The second thing is The Body Keeps the Score. It's a great book on dealing with trauma. Now trauma, a lot of times people think that means soldiers who are in war and who saw people die and their best friends and they're dealing with PTSD, uh, post-traumatic stress disorder. But the reality is, is a lot of people can have that. So whether you, your parents or your siblings or someone in your life was abusive to you as a kid, or it could be you just got really scared. You saw something that was pretty wild. It could be when I lived in Missouri, when I grew up, I remember being in 4th grade and seeing 9/11. And it could be, it's a, could be relatively small, but that made a massive difference on me. Small indicator or a small example of trauma, and that shapes how you feel. And so what The Body Keeps the Score does is it teaches you how to recognize when you've experienced a little bit of trauma or a lot of bit of trauma and how to deal with it. And so that's a great book. And the second thing I like right now is How to Change Your Mind. I don't drink any alcohol. I haven't had a drop of alcohol in 8 years. Not a— not a drop. I don't do drugs. I, I like— I'm not I'm not against weed. In fact, in many regards, I'm in favor of it, but I personally just don't do it because it's never jived well with my personality. That said, I'm incredibly fascinated right now with psychedelics. I have a lot of friends who do microdosing LSD, who do microdosing ketamine, and I'm not an expert on it yet, but How to Change Your Mind is a great book that looks at trauma and how to deal with it. And how a lot of folks are turning to psychedelics and how that can impact you. And I'm very, very interested in that. And the third thing that I really like when it comes to controlling your emotions is this YouTube channel called School of Life. It's this philosopher named Alan— I think it's Alan de Botton, I think his name is— and he does a really good job of explaining why people feel a certain way and how to deal with that. And I have found his YouTube channel— it's free— to be incredibly impactful on controlling my emotions. And the last thing that I do, this is an exercise. I thought I— this was unique to me. It's not. So I used to do this years ago, and I still do it to this day. And it turns out there's a name to it. It's— it— some people call it, uh, negative, a negative thought exercise. I call it looking at the downside. And so what I like to do in order to control my emotions, because the thing with controlling your emotions is you have to control the up and the down, because when you start a company or when you start anything, typically you have a fair bit of highs, and the highs are probably as good feeling as you, as you think. Or maybe even a little bit less than you think. Um, but the downs are typically way worse than you can imagine. It's really hard to control the downs because when you start anything, um, controlling the down is the hard part. And most people are shocked at how low you can feel when you're starting something, even when things appear to be going well. And so what I like to do is I like to think in my mind, I'll close my eyes. I do this a lot, a lot of times in the morning. I'll do it at night as well. As I close my eyes and I think, what's the worst possible outcome right now? And so it could be I get sick, my family gets sick, I'm gonna die. And I visualize what, what that feels like. And if you do it for long enough with your eyes closed, after about 5 or 10 minutes you can really feel what that feels like. And then I do two things. I say to myself, all right, that is the worst that can happen. I just experienced it. Anything else that happens today, it is only upside. And it really makes you have a lot of gratitude and appreciate that that hasn't actually happened. And the second thing that I like to do with this exercise is And this relates particularly to starting a company or getting a job or moving somewhere else that's new and just starting your life is I try to protect the downside. So for example, if you are going to start a company, you can ask yourself, well, in order to start this business, I need a little bit of cash. And so you have to be very specific. You have to say, how much cash do I need? Well, right now I'm spending $3,000 a month. How much, how many months saved do I need in order to, to feel good about this? And so let's say we come up with the number 6. That means I need 6 times $3,000. I need $18,000 in savings. I'm gonna go out and get that $18,000. Okay, I've got that $18,000. What else is the worst case scenario here? What's the downside here? Well, I could spend all my money and my business goes under. Now, do I want to be homeless? No, I'm not willing to accept being homeless. Okay, so what's the next— so I have to protect myself from being homeless. How would I protect myself from being homeless? Well, I would probably get a job driving Uber because I have a car. Do I want to— am I willing to accept that? No, I'm not willing to accept that. Or maybe you are, and then that's the worst case scenario. But this one stage up could be maybe, well, I'll just get a white-collar job at a huge corporation, and I'll just be a cog in their big wheel and their machine, and it won't be fulfilling, it won't be glamorous, but it'll be a really good 9-to-5 with benefits, benefits. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and make friends with recruiters at those companies right now, even though this isn't even coming close to hap— it's not happening yet. And so at least at this point, if something ever bad happens, I know that I have a connection at IBM or I have a connection at Target headquarters, or I have a connection at Intuit, or just the biggest companies in the world, and the likelihood that I can get a job there is relatively high. Am I willing to accept that that is the worst-case scenario? Yes, I am willing to accept that. And so what I do is I go up the scale of like, all right, where's the lowest that I'm willing to accept? Now I'm going to lock that, that, that in as best as I can. So now anything that happens above this, I am happy and it is only upside. And so that's what I like to do to control my emotions when it comes to taking risk. The second skill that I think is incredibly important, and this is maybe the number one or number two skill, I think in terms of business, I think it's the number one skill. And so This skill is copywriting. I think copywriting is the most important skill that you can have for business and one of the most important skills that you can have in life. And here's why. When you learn how to write well, you learn how to think well. You, when you learn how to write clearly, you learn how to think clearly. And copywriting is a particular type of writing, but it's not just limited to writing. Copywriting is understanding how people think and how they feel. And how to use the written word or a script or spoken word in order to sell a product or sell an idea. Basically, how do you use words to get people to do what you want them to do? And the way that you do that is you have to understand what motivates them, what makes them, uh, uh, what, what makes them work. And so this can be applied to literally anything. I have made tens of millions of dollars this way. Using copywriting, but I've also met my wife this way. I learned when I was, when I was trying to meet her, she was way out of my league. And so I used what I learned in copywriting to like get her attention and make her, or at least try to make her interested in me. Copywriting, copywriting is incredibly effective. I've used it to get customers, like as in people to buy stuff from us or for The Hustle to get advertisers. I've used it to get speakers to our events. I've used it to recruit people. I've used it to sell people on this interesting idea I have. Copywriting is incredibly important and it boils down to a bunch of really simple principles, but the easiest one to remember for this conversation is AIDA, A-I-D-A, attention, interest, desire, action. For the majority of your copywriting life, which for most of you it has nothing to do with getting a job, it's just a good skillset to have in life. Attention, interest, desire, action is the framework that you need. So when you write, you line it up with attention. Can I get your attention? Interest. Can I tell you some facts that get you interested and get you to fall down the slippery slope? Because once I get you to start reading my work, I can get you to, uh, keep buying into what I'm saying. And it's really hard to get people to fall down that slope, but interest, uh, by specifically tell them very interesting facts facts and features about the story that you just started with, your action point, or sorry, your attention point. Desire is the second part, so I'm gonna make you desire whatever I'm selling, and I'm gonna get you to desire that by telling you things that you don't know and how this can benefit your life, and then finally action, I'm gonna tell you specifically how to get you to act. And so, here's an example that my friend Neville always uses, uses that I love, which is if I'm going to tell you— I'm going to try and convince a 15-year-old guy to drink more water. I could say, drink more water, it's healthy for you. Or— and a lot of these facts aren't necessarily true because I didn't research what water does for you, but I very easily could use this premise for that. I'm going to say, have you ever seen those guys with huge muscles at the gym carrying around gallons of water in their hand? It's like they use those milk containers to carry water. So that's how I get your attention. You see, they're doing that because if you drink a, if you drink a gallon of water a day, the likelihood that your muscles will grow by 30% more than had you not drink water. Now the reason that happens, and this is the desire part, the, yeah, this is the desire part. The reason that happens is because water has these molecules in them that helps oxygen travel through your blood, and oxygen is needed to build up your muscles. That's my desire part, is I'm, I'm trying to show you how to build up your muscles. And when that oxygen goes to your muscles, they grow 30% faster. So, and this is the action part, if you want to build big muscles and be healthier than before, you need to drink about a gallon of water a day per 100 pounds of body weight. So that action part, I specifically explained how to do that. Now that was just a silly example. I don't, I don't, none of that shit's true, but you get the point. This ADA, it works wonderfully. And I always think that, I always tell people, you gotta learn copywriting and the, and, and there's a few great ways to learn it. You can do what I did, which was very labor intensive and very effective, but it takes a lot of time and that's called copywork.. And so what I did was I got a hold of the 100 Best Sales Letters of All Time. I don't know what makes it the 100 best, but it's just famous sales letters. So then in the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, before the internet really came around, and it even happened after that, but predominantly before that, these salesmen would send these letters to people's homes and they would try to convince people to get interested in buying a vacuum or an encyclopedia or a pair of sunglasses. And the— it was typically the— they typically wrote to wives. The housewife would take out her checkbook and be like, oh, this is really interesting. I need to buy this. And she would write a check, put it into the envelope and sail it back. That's a lot of friction. And so these people were so good at using words because it was so expensive to send out all these letters. They had to be good. They were so good at using their words that they had to— that they convinced these strangers to write a check and mail it to them.. And so I found these 100 letters, and if you Google best sales letters of all time, you're gonna find them. And I would, I spent probably 6 months where I would spend about 2 or 3 hours a day. And when I was 22 years old, I would write them all out by hand. I would also do that with books. So The Great Gatsby, Saturday Night Live, live scripts, I would do it with movie scripts, just any piece of great writing I would do that with. And when you do this, it's kind of like how you learn an instrument. The way that we teach people how to play music, it's incredibly effective. So if I hand you a guitar or a piano, I don't say, go ahead, write a song. I tell you, copy the Star-Spangled Banner, go play Jingle Bells, go look at Jimi Hendrix, go look at Led Zeppelin, play all this, all these, copy all these other people, steal their work for a little while. And, or whatever genre you're interested, go and copy them exactly. And in time, you're gonna learn how to feel the texture. You're gonna see the patterns that work best. That works extremely well with writing, and it's the same concept. I call it copywork. This is how a lot of people used to learn. Our school, our schooling, the way that we do it now, it's changed over the last handful of decades, but for a long time, people used to do this. Ben Franklin was a great writer and he said this is how he learned how to write. And it's really effective. So, it's called copywork. The second thing that you can do— and I'm biased. Neville is my good friend, but there's this guy named Neville Medhora. And I actually met him because I bought his course. And I bought his course and then after I took his course, I became friends with him. And years later, we became best friends and he was the best man at my wedding. So, I love Neville and so I'm biased. But his course is what I took to learn about copywriting. He's got this course called Copywriting Kourse. It's spelled with a K, copy with a K and course with a K. I don't know. It's how it stands out. It's a great course. I don't know how much it costs right now. It could cost a few hundred bucks or $100. I don't even know. But it's relatively affordable. And I think if you don't like it, he'll refund you his money, your money. But anyway, it's a great course. So it teaches a lot of this stuff. It's worth it. It's totally worth it. And I actually think if— I used to promote this so much that if you go to copywritingcourse.com/sam, I've got like a referral link and I think there's like a $50 off code or something you could use. So, uh, if that interests you, do that. The third thing is this book called Advertising Secrets of the Written Word by Joe Sugarman. It's a great book. It costs $10 and I bet you if you Google Google it correctly, you can find a free PDF of it online. It's a great book that walks you through copywriting principles and why certain things work and why they don't. And finally, the last thing, it's not a copywriting thing, but it's a writing thing, and it's a book by Stephen King called On Writing. And the first half of the book is— it reads really fast, it's only 250 pages maybe. The first half, it's all about his tools and tricks and his toolbox, he calls it, his toolkit or his toolbox for writing well. And it's incredibly effective. It's, uh, he has got rules like don't use too many adverbs or keep your sentences short, things like that. It's incredibly effective. It's a great book on writing. The second half of the book is about his biography and it's really, really fascinating. So it's called On Writing by Stephen King. So the second skill set that I wanted to go through, copywriting. I think that because I know how I would say I'm a pretty good copywriter, I'm a B. Because I am a B copywriter until the day I die, I will never be homeless. I will always make money. Now, verdict's still out if I'm gonna be very, very wealthy, but I will bet everything, which I, I am betting everything by starting businesses and things like that, that no matter what happens, I will always be able to make a really good salary, whether as an employee or selling someone else's products. So I think that copywriting is incredibly effective. It's, it's just, it's really useful for your life, business, and just living. Okay, we're going to go to the third one and the fourth one, and then that's it. The third one, the, or the third skill set or thing that I've learned in business that pretty much shocked me. I, I really only learned this in the last year, but looking back at it, people have told me this forever. Which is there's a massive difference, a massive gap in skills, and a lot of people cross it, but there's— the gap exists of starting and managing. So when you start businesses, a lot of people think of Mark Zuckerberg and they're like, this college kid started this thing. He was 20 when he started it. Now he's only 30, or he's— could be 25 still, and he manages 10,000 employees. He hired the the best people in the world from Princeton and Stanford and Harvard, and he stole people from Amazon, the brightest minds on earth. And you think, yeah, that's just how it goes. Well, managing those people and the business, it's incredibly challenging. And oftentimes the people who are creative and crazy enough to start companies, a lot of times the skill sets they needed to start it are not only different, but oftentimes opposite of what it takes to run. When you start something, you could look at a lot of spreadsheets and you could kind of like guess your way there. But a lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of times starting something, it's completely irrational on paper. Things may or may not work and you just got to be creative and you got to do shit and you got to move fast and you're not going to have meetings. You're not going to talk to people about stuff. You're just going to move quickly and you're going to execute and you're going to do it. And it's a very creative process. It's almost like creating a piece of art. Like maybe there's some equation that says like the perfect rectangle looks this way. But every— but a lot of times there's just Picasso who just says, fuck it, this is interesting to me, I'm doing this. And sometimes it works. That's kind of what starting a business is. But managing a business is a lot different. And so at our company, I did a pretty good job of getting us to about $1 million a month in sales. But towards the ends of that, I was breaking. I was doing horrible. I was not good at managing it and I was very unhappy. And so we hired— one of my first hires was this guy named Adam who I went to high school with. And he's now president of our company and he runs a lot of the day-to-day stuff. So I kind of, I kind of, I'm like, he's like sandwiched in the middle, whereas I'm really good at thinking of these really high-level ideas. And I'm also really good at going in at the very bottom and just being an individual contributor and, and creating interesting things. I'm not always great at managing the day-to-day of, of what's going on. It's, I bet I could get good at it, but it just really doesn't interest me. And that was really hard to learn. And I struggled with this for years. I, like I said, I hired a CEO coach. I had, we have a handful of really great angel investors and I kind of talked to them and I'm like, I don't know what to do here. And it wasn't until I realized that Adam is one of the best at this. He loves this. He's the type of guy who was the captain of the football team, the president of student council. He loves leading people. And it kind of hit me. I'm like, man, the way that I sometimes don't understand why people are unwilling to start something or how on earth they're afraid of starting, I am kind of like that on the other end with managing. There's people who it— whether it comes naturally to them or they've just worked on the skill set, they're really good at it. And so in a way, I was wearing this backpack that was full of weight and I hated carrying it on my shoulders, I just took out some of the weight and I put it in Adam's bag and he loves carrying it. And so through this process, I mentioned earlier we have HustleCon speakers. Through this process, I actually talked to a lot of people at our conferences and that was one of the major things that I used to ask people, which is, do you have a right-hand man or a right-hand woman? Do you have someone leading the day-to-day? Because I'm struggling with that, how do you do that? And there was typically two answers, which was, yeah, I don't like it, it's really hard. And I could sense that these people, I'm talking, I mean, I don't wanna call anyone out, but go and just Google like HustleCon speakers or something, look at all the people who we've had at our events, and this is the type of person, or those are the people who told me this, which was, they would say like, I am horrible at managing this. Or oftentimes they would have like one of their assistants or like a keeper or like a handler, like with them. And I would be like, hey, what's this person like as a manager? And the answers were pretty consistently pretty bad. This person's not good. And so the first answer was, I'm not good at it. I'm really struggling with it. And a lot of times those people would say, I wish I had someone who I could replace myself as CEO. I would hear that all the time. I was shocked by it. And the second answer that I got was, yeah, I hired a really good COO or a really good president, and this is my right-hand woman or right-hand man, and they run a lot of the day-to-day and it allows me to focus on what I do best. And the people who said number 2 were way happier, and oftentimes I think a lot more successful. Now, there are these rare occasions where the person who started it is just— they're also a great CEO or a great people manager. Um, that, that definitely happens, but often it is not the case. I'm looking at a photo of Ted Turner. Ted Turner is one of my heroes. He was pretty notoriously a bad manager. He was a great leader. People wanted to follow him into battle, but what he would do is he would come up with these great ideas. So Ted Turner came up with the idea of CNN and he launched it, but before that he had other businesses. And when he came up to CNN, a lot of people think Ted Turner, you're the guy who started CNN. Well, yeah, he is, but he also— there's another guy named Reese. And Reese was the guy leading the day-to-day. Ted would come, came up with the idea and then he went away for 3 months and did a sailing competition. So having these right-hand people is very important. And a lot of times I feel like I'm the right-hand person at this point. But I think that it's really important to understand the difference between starting and managing. I mean, for a long time, it was normal that they would call them gray hairs. It was normal to get a gray-haired leader to come in for a startup. So these young people would come up with this idea for this great tech company, and then this, the investor would say, all right, let's go hire a CEO. And that is not popular right now, but I think it should be. I think it's actually quite effective. Maybe not CEO, but you definitely need this team of experienced people. And, and so the reason why I brought this up is it's a, it's something that most people I've found struggle with, but there's not a lot of resources out there, not a lot of people talking about it. And so I think it's really important to learn this Ultimately, the skill set comes down to delegating. And there's 4 resources that I'll have that I've liked. The first one, I don't like the name of the book, but it's very helpful. It's by a guy named Felix Dennis. Felix Dennis, he was this, he's dead now. He died a few years ago, maybe 10 years ago. He was, he's kind of like Richard Branson, but more vulgar. He was a British entrepreneur. He started Dennis Publishing, which launched Maxim Magazine, which launched a ton of great titles. It's still like a $200 million a year business. He also launched Micro Warehouse, which basically before Amazon was around, it was like Amazon for software. And it was a huge multi-billion dollar publicly traded company. So, very successful entrepreneur, close to a billionaire. And so, this is why I don't mind his book being titled so horribly. It's called How to Get Rich. And the reason why I don't mind it is because he was really successful. He wasn't this like get rich quick guy.. And in that book, he does a great job of talking about delegating. And that book, I use it as a reference book. I read all the time about how to work with people. That's my go-to. The second one is, I like The One Minute Manager. Just Google it, you'll find it. It's a great book on managing. The third thing is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And so it's a great book that looks at what successful teams and people look like and what they don't look like, more importantly. And so you Oftentimes, the best way to be good at something is you find out the bad ways of doing it and you just don't do that. And the fourth thing is one of my investors is this guy named Tucker Max. Tucker Max, if you're a man and you're between the ages of probably 28 and 40, you probably know who Tucker Max is. He was famous 'cause he had this blog called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. And it was very controversial. It was basically about his frat days and he was just this wild partier and drinker. So, he has a really controversial opinion. But after— he's in his 40s now, so he's no longer a kid, but he's really thoughtful at this point. He's kind of turned his image around, and he has a great blog where he, A, talked about firing himself and replacing himself as CEO. And he— it's maybe like a 12-part blog. It's really good. I would highly recommend everyone reading it. And he's one of my investors, and he's kind of a mentor to me. You know, he— him and I are kind of similar in that we try to be macho and Or at least we started that way of wanting to be macho and show no weakness. But he's actually done a really good job of being introspective and talking about his feelings a lot. And he's done really good about talking about managing people. He, Tucker also has this great book on how to create a, or this great document on how to manage a company or like create a culture. And you could Google Tucker Max culture document and you'll see it. It's free. Okay, the fourth and final skill set that I want people to take away from this rambling is how to influence people. Influence— whether you— I'll call it persuasion or influence. It's very similar to, similar to copywriting, but this one's a little bit more psychological, but it's similar. And what most people don't realize is is how to get people to do what you want them to do, or how to influence them to think how you think. And that sounds evil, but that's not how I mean it. I mean, you could use it for evil ways. I mean, the stuff that, uh, you convince people to give to a nonprofit, or you convince people of certain morals, or why something's bad and something's good, it's the same stuff that you can use to get people to do a lot of really bad things. And so this is definitely a scary skill set to learn. But if you— but the thing is, is that people are like animals. I mean, in the same way that if you show a dog food, you know, what's that Pavlovian experiment where you show a dog food and you ring a bell so the dog starts associating the bell with the food, and so whenever you ring the bell, he starts slobbering? People are the same way. You can— there's all these little tricks that you can do to get people to say yes to certain things or get them to buy into certain things more. So for example, If I'm a politician and I want to put a huge billboard in your front yard, the likelihood that I— of me just knocking on your door and asking to put this big billboard in your yard, the likelihood of you saying yes is pretty low. But if I go in there and I say, hey, can I put this small little sticker on your window? And you— and the likelihood of you saying yes to that is quite high. Now, if I go back a week later and ask you to put this big billboard in your front yard, the likelihood then that you're going to say yes is a lot higher than had I not asked you to put that small sticker because you're already bought in. And there's about 8 or 9 principles just like this of getting you to buy into things. So another one's the rule of reciprocity. And so what that means is let's say that I go out or let's say that you go out of town and you and I'm your neighbor and you ask me to check your mail for you when I'm gone. And I say, yeah, sure, no problem, I'll check your mail. You— I've just done a favor for you. Now you owe me a favor. And this is how humans work. We all— we work on favors. And so now let's say next week I go, hey, look, I watched— I, I, um, I checked your mail last week. Can I borrow your car for a day? The likelihood that you're going to say yes is actually a lot higher because I've already done you a favor. And so the interesting thing about the rule of reciprocity is that people pay it back disproportionately, meaning I can do a really small favor for someone and then I can ask them to do a much bigger favor. And shockingly, a lot of times they'll say yes. And so there's about 8 or 9 of these principles that are incredibly effective for influencing people. Another example, I've used this before. I wanted to go— I went and bought a motorcycle for a guy for 3 grand, or he was asking 3 grand for it. And I thought it was— I thought, yeah, I'd be willing to pay about $2,200 for this. And so I went and bought a can of Coke. I bought 2 of them. And when I showed up to the place, I opened up one, I started drinking. I go, hey man, uh, you thirsty? You want a Coke? I was just down the street and I bought one and I thought maybe you'd want one too. He opened it up and he starts drinking it. And I go, cool motorcycle, I'll give you $22,000. And he goes, ah, everyone's been offering me that, I'm not gonna do it. But you seem like a nice guy. I'll do it. Fine. And so I don't know if the Coke was the reason, but that's just an example of there's all these little tiny things that if you do 'em effectively, they kind of add up to be pretty effective. And so to learn these things, there's this great book by Robert Cialdini called Influence. If you just Google influence book, you'll see it. His name's Robert Cialdini. Read that. It's— it's— that book changed my life. And the second one, which is pretty famous, a lot of people know it, it's called How to Win Friends and Influence People. Um, that book, I think that book is one of the best-selling books of all time, the best-selling non-fiction books of all time. It was written in the 1930s, 1920s. It's still 100% effective. Uh, so go and read those two books. And I think that if you learn how to influence people, It's really, really, really effective and it will shock you. Now, like, I was a nerd in high school and I liked women. And so I was always just like any other kid. I want to go meet girls. I remember reading this book as a kid. I was like, I want them to like me. How do I do that? And so I read this book and I would apply this stuff to meet girls and it worked. I'm married to an amazing woman and she was way out of my league when I first met her and still is out of my league. And I remember I used some of these things when I met her. And it helped me kind of get my foot in the door. And so this stuff will help you make money, it will help you start a company, it'll help you balance your emotions, or it will help you meet your, your future spouse. Um, it's incredibly effective. And so I'm gonna wrap this up. Those are the 4 skills that I wanted to talk about today. This whole corona thing, man, it's, it's weird. I didn't, I didn't want to talk about little business and schemes today, but I wanted to talk about a few things that actually impact your life more than just— more foundational things that can impact your life bigger than just a business. And I don't know, maybe we'll have to call this like the recession-proof skill set or something like that. But that's it. Let me know how you feel about this. I miss my best bud Sean, my co-host. He's not here today, so tweet at me @TheSamPar. Let me know what you thought about this if you actually made it all the way through. Maybe we'll do more of them, but, uh, good luck. Talk to you soon.