The Struggle IS THE Journey | Ep 817
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What you complain about is the price, the price tag. No one says, "Hey, I don't want to make money." They say, "Hey, I don't like the price of making money." "Hey, I don't like the price of this influence that I want to have." "I don't like the price of gaining this subscriber base." "I don't like the price of running ads profitably, making $5 every dollar I put in." "I don't like the price of learning how to do that." But the price is the suffering that you go through not knowing and embracing the uncertainty of not knowing how long you'll have to suffer. It's not about not suffering.

I think it's about finding something worthy of suffering. My number one tweet of all time happened in the last month. It was November, I think. And it was, "You must first become consistent before you can become exceptional." And I thought I would start with that because I feel in reading some of the comments and posts inside of the community that I don't think this is understood.

And so I wanted to break both of those pieces apart. So first is, you know, what is commitment? And the second is what is exceptional from the commitment perspective? I define commitment as the elimination of alternatives. For example, if you get married, you commit by saying that you will not be with anyone else. So you eliminate alternatives. So it's the ultimate commitment. There's a, there's a story that I really like of a young lad who was talking to his grandfather and

and uh he said he wanted to make the football team and so they're out to breakfast and they're uh just a normal diner you know he's got he's got some bacon he's got some eggs right and he says i want to i want to i want to be i want to make varsity this year and his grandfather looks at him he's like i mean are you interested or are you committed and he's like i'm committed he's like well i'm

this chicken that laid the eggs on your plate that you're eating right now, that chicken was interested, right? He's like, but that pig that gave the bacon, the pig's committed. And I just love that as just a great visual representation of what it means to be committed. I think many of you, and to be clear, I'm not saying you shouldn't put food on the table if this is something that's brand new for you, right? If starting a business is brand new,

then I'm not saying that. That's not my point here. My point here is that there's other things, there are other alternatives that you're either entertaining mentally or that you're actually entertaining that are not this thing. And the difficulty is that there's an inherent fallacy in that belief set, which is that I will work on many things and I will see which one works when the reality is all of them can work if you do. And

The second part of it is that none of them will work if you try to pursue them all. And so you may have heard the saying, you can have everything you want in life, just not at the same time. And I tend to be a believer in this, in that people have an unwillingness to make trade-offs and they try and speak in absolutes. And I think a lot of the content that I make, for example, gets snippets will be taken out of context. And that's the nature of the internet and decried, or, you know, people will get upset about it because they're

I will speak of a trade-off and they will say, I am not willing to make that trade. And I'm saying, don't, don't make that trade if you don't want to make that trade. But there is a price tag that is associated with the things that we want. And I think my biggest pet peeve is when people say, I want the thing, but I don't want to pay the price. And so the price in the beginning is commitment. It's consistency. You must first become consistent before you become exceptional.

Consistency is one of those, as Charlie Munger put it in one of his seminal talks on, it was a graduation speech that he gave, and he talked about inverting success. He said, "So how would I guarantee failure?"

And among the rules of guaranteeing failure is to be inconsistent. He said it's very difficult to be unsuccessful if you are consistent. So for sure, you want to make sure that you are inconsistent, that you start and you stop, that you interrupt the flow of growth, that you switch tracks as many times as possible. And I see this as a common theme, especially for those of you who are starting out.

And I can speak viscerally to it because I understand it well because I've been in the same position. And it wasn't until I was willing to accept that I cannot have it all that I started to get something. What I would like to kind of reinforce is the elimination of FOMO. So fear of missing out. I think FOMO happens when we do not understand the trade that someone else makes and we simply see the outcome of their inputs, but the inputs are invisible.

And so when we look at social media and you see the ads or you see content, you always see a curated highlight reel. You only see the outcome. You don't see what goes into it. And so it gives a false conception of what it took to get there.

Many people joke about the 10-year overnight success, but I have really yet to meet anyone who's been in business that didn't take basically five years to figure out what the hell is going on. You basically just want to pay down that five years as fast as you can. Now, some of you are two years into that five years or three years into that five years. I want to be clear here. If you're not making a dollar within 12 months, then you have a problem. You're not doing a very basic part of business.

But if you and the solution to that is likely take more action. But for the people who have made some money, but not as much as they want to make, it's typically because you have some level of skill set, but not nearly enough volume. I think I might have said this last week, but volatility is a symptom of insufficient volume.

And so if you feel like you're not getting as many leads or as many customers as you want, it's simply because you're not doing enough. And the reason you're not doing enough is either you're distracted doing many things that aren't actually adding to the sufficient volume. And so in your mind, you see yourself or you feel yourself working all the time. You sit in front of your computer.

You know, like you're at home and you feel like you're like, this is work time, right? I've got my timer on. I've got my earplugs in. I'm working. But if you look at the nature of what you're doing, you're skipping between tasks constantly. And so you never actually move the ball forward on the things that matter. The elimination of alternatives is what you can do to show commitment. Like, how do you see if someone is committed? You look at how many alternatives they have given themselves, right?

Right. There's the old saying, I think it was the Vikings that did this originally, but the saying has been pervasive at this point, which is when they would go try to sack a city, the Vikings would land on the enemy shores and then they would burn the boats.

And there's a very different level of commitment when you burn the boats and you can't go home. And the only way that you can go home is that you sack the city. You tend to fight differently. You fight as though your back's against the wall because you've eliminated alternatives. Some of you probably do have alternatives. But the thing is, is that those alternatives don't serve you because they are draining the resources that you have to hit sufficient volume. And the big part about hitting sufficient volume isn't intensity of one day.

You can work out as hard as you want one day every three weeks and you're not going to look different. And you can do that for years. That's the thing that's crazy is you can do it for years. You can say that I work out, I've been working out for years and I look the same. My genetics suck. My workout regimen sucks. But you could do 10 minutes, seven days a week and get significantly better results. And you would have results that would improve.

And as crazy as that sounds, it's also true. And the thing is, it's also true in business. And so the question comes down to what are the things that we're doing instead? Every person has the same time allotments. The only thing that we have is the great equalizer. We all have the same amount of time. Right now, we don't know how long we all have. But in terms of one second for me is one second for you and is one second for somebody across the world. And so it's not that you lack time. It's that you have priorities that are mismatched.

And I think if I had one objective for this little, you know, podcast, right, whatever you want to call it, is for you to really look at the things that you're doing and determine whether they are actually reflections of your priorities. If you were to show me your schedule and your bank account, I can tell you what your priorities are, right? What your priorities are. Because I can see what you vote with in terms of your dollars and your seconds, right?

And those will be the things that you truly care about. And so the thing is, it's very easy to say, I am committed. It's very hard to be committed because being committed has to happen every single day. You have to continue to keep the alternatives at bay. You have to eliminate the boats of rowing home, right? And so many of you, it could be your jobs is the boat that is right there, right? It could be

It could be the next shiny object that you're considering. But each of these are boats that you kind of keep one foot on shore, one foot on the boat. And then you're kind of trying to throw rocks a little bit at these cities thinking you're going to sack them. But you're not. And your rocks aren't even hitting the city because you're not even getting close enough because you're so afraid of commitment. And the thing is, we have to make bets, right?

Like you got to take risk. The amount of risk that you need to take to win is honestly very little. Jeff Bezos recently said this, and I like this from an interview and he doesn't do many of them. He said that, I think as humans, we have, we systematically overestimate risk and underestimate upside or potential or opportunity. And I think that that is very true in entrepreneurship. That bias that we have is what has kept us alive, right?

but it does not serve you to help you get to the next level. I think it would behoove you to look at what worst case scenario actually is. Worst case scenario might just be like, you're, I mean, are you really going to be homeless? Probably not. And when I see homeless people, it's really that they are friendless.

And so they have no one who wants to help them. And so many of you, I would consider, are socially normal people. And I say that in this very rare instance, not as an insult. Right. Like you have a social circle. You have people who care about you. And the likelihood that you actually become homeless if you are hardworking and just have a bad bet that goes wrong is very unlikely.

And I've never said I was, quote, homeless in my life. But like when I made the bet on the gym, I slept at the gym. Some people would be like, I slept out of my car. It's like, I mean, I didn't really. I never slept in my car. I just slept at my gym. Right now, did I have a home? Technically, no. And to the same degree, there was a period of time when I was launching the gyms and we lost everything where I went back to Layla's parents house. Was I homeless? No, I was just staying at someone else's place.

And so these are like the true worst case scenarios.

And so let me tell you a story. So my father, I think when he was 17, he left Iran on a student visa. So they had a program before the fall of the Shah, which is when the revolution in Iran happened, when it went from Western to super fundamental religious, where they would pay for you to go to school as long as you came back and took the learnings back to Iran. And so that was basically the plan that he was on. Now, while he was away, the revolution occurred. And then obviously that deal was no longer valid.

And so he went to Paris to study medicine. Now, wrinkle number one in this plan, he didn't speak French. And so medical system in Europe, if you're not familiar with it, is everyone is accepted and few people pass. It's kind of the opposite of the American system where almost no one gets in and then everyone passes once you're in, right? The hardest part about most colleges, at least in the US or universities or medical schools is getting in. The hard part is not passing. There it's inverted. Anyone can start, but few people graduate.

And so I think in the first year, it was something like, it's something like 70% of people fail the first year. My father was in that first 70% is because he didn't speak French. And so he's, imagine trying to take organic chemistry in Chinese, like hard because he's a, he's a, he's a persevering guy. He started again the next year at zero again, and he took the grade again. And then the second year he also failed. So then he calls to his brother and

And his brother lives in Paris too. And he says, Hey, you know, I don't know if this doctor thinks for me. And his brother said, you know what, why don't you just, just, just go somewhere else, like get a fresh start. And my father was thinking about going to Brussels, which is in Belgium. He said, why don't you just start over there? You know, and this is now your third year of, you know, being a French speaking country, just see how it goes. So my father tries a third time.

And he, you know, he ends up passing that year and then, you know, ends up continuing. He graduates top of his class by the whatever, sixth or seventh year, because it's a much longer system there. College and your degree are one there. In school, he meets my mother. My mother is French and she was also an American citizen, but she was born in Paris and then immigrated there. But she went to school in Belgium. And so she says, you should come back to the United States with me. And so he goes with her, knows no one. Also,

doesn't know English. So he gets to the U.S. and of course, his his his his MD is not valid here and he can't pass the test because he can't speak English. He then tries to apply to to just get a residency so that he can learn English and then begin that process. He doesn't get any residencies because he doesn't speak English.

And so my father watches television during the day and takes it was like phonics or something. I can't remember what it is, but there's some English thing back in the day. And he took that during the day and he was able to get a minimum wage job as an x-ray tech. And so he basically ran slides for people like back and forth between the development room and the doctor's office. Meanwhile, he's a fully certified physician and surgeon.

And so then while this is happening, it takes one year, nothing. It takes a second year, still working minimum wage. Now his wife, mind you, is like going on the path. And then finally he's able to get some, my mother's father to pull some favor to get him to get a residency at a medical place in Texas. So he then goes from Baltimore to Texas without my mother to try and do this residency. And so he finally gets the residency.

And he ends up being a physician finally. So he gets back to Baltimore, which is where I'm from. And he starts the practice out of the same office as my mother. And so they decided, you know, joint rent, that makes sense. But he wanted to start a cash practice with no insurance. So he had no flow of patients that were coming his way. And so about a year or two later, it's slow. It's not really working too well for him. Again, he still has a pretty thick accent.

But right as it's about to start working, his income starts to get close to my mother's. They then get divorced. And so she changes the locks on the doors without letting him know. So you imagine you go to work, right? You've got patients that day. You've got people you need to see and you can't get into the office and no one wants to let you in, right? You can imagine the drama, right? And so at this time, he has no way of...

of doing anything. Right. And so he then is like, well, what can I do? And so he doesn't have that much money. And he's like, OK, I guess I'll have to start my own office. But as a surgeon, you have to have a surgery center. You have to have a place that you can do surgery legally to have an office that had a surgery center. He got quotes and it was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And that was in then's money. So two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that he didn't have.

He then takes it upon himself to learn what the legal requirements are for a surgery center and builds a goddamn surgery center himself by going to Home Depot back and forth and builds the fucking thing. And then he finally has his office and he can start practicing medicine. And he's been in that office for 35 years. I would go to him and I would be frustrated.

By the lack of progress that I felt in my career or my life, right, as a student, then as a as an employee, you know, I'm not getting promoted fast enough. I don't see opportunities here. And then when I started my gyms like this isn't going fast enough. Right.

He said, listen, I wasted two years when I was in Europe. And when I came to the US, I wasted another three years before I could even start practicing. And then when I started practicing, I had to start over after two years because I didn't have an office and my reputation got smeared. You know how many people ask me about that now? No one. You just look at me and be like, life is long.

He's like, you've got time and it's not linear. And I bring this up because I hear the comments of this is so hard. And I'm like, guys, come on. Like we're talking about six inch putts. We're not talking about, you know, trying to trying to launch a missile into space and catch it with chopsticks here.

you know we're just trying to advertise our stuff let people know about it and get them to exchange money for goods and services this is not we're not curing cancer here the lack of effort that i see drives me nuts and so i tell that story to provide context to like if you look at yourself in the mirror and say am i really trying as hard as i think i could am i really leaving everything

On the field, am I emptying the tank? At the end of the day, are you like, you know what, I could have done more. Because if you are, then you need to fix that first. Like you must first become consistent before you can become exceptional. It's the prerequisite. There's not a single person who's exceptional who is not consistent. You have to keep sticking with it.

And a big part of this is figuring it out. Because if you can't figure out the basics, you're certainly not going to figure out the advanced stuff. And everything that's on the internet now makes it available. It's all accessible. There was no YouTube when my dad was trying to figure this out.

right there was no Instagram there were no influencers right and to be fair there was no one who's trying to help him out if anything everyone the system was set against him you know the guy had he had a thousand dollars when he came here and didn't speak English but what he did have my grandfather would say this he said he had one brain in two hands so he used them it's like you have one brain in two hands you got one life you know use it and uh I just I you could probably hear it in my voice I just I get very frustrated because

Because figuring it out is the journey. Like that's the point. And the failure that comes along with figuring it out is what leads to the success and the feeling of figuring it out. Like you never get the benefit of, oh my God, I got it to work unless you go through the pain of why isn't this working? I think a big part of it is expectations.

is expecting that it's going to work the first time. It's expecting that it should happen in six weeks. Show me any company, show me any great, anything that's happened in six weeks, literally anything. A year even then is tough to think of anything great. Can't become a doctor in a year.

Right. You can't build a massive company in a year. You can start. That's what you can do. You can start. You can start and you can figure out one piece at a time. I want to encourage you to stick with it because the years aren't wasted because you are the product of those years. Right. And my dad learned how to build a surgery center because he had to. And I can promise you starting an online community is easier than that.

Right. And doing it when you don't speak the language is also hard. Part of this is I share my upbringing that I don't share as much. But like, you got to feel that. You know what I mean? Like, it's you like you got to do that. Like, no one's going to do it for you. Like, no one. I'm not going to do it for you. I can't. No one can. And so I think many of you are looking for saviors when you need to look in the mirror.

And for the few of you who are like, you know, the people in my family don't support me and, you know, my wife or my spouse is not, you know, is not supportive. How bad do you want it? Like, what are you willing to give up? I'm not saying give up your relationship, but I'm saying you can give up approval for a short period of time. Okay, I need you to take this in. One of the toughest parts about being human is the social construct.

Right. Is how we learn. Right. We learn through shame. Right. A lot of times, like you do something wrong. Someone yells at you. You feel shame. You want to be in the in-group. And then that corrects your behavior. And honestly, it's a pretty good system. Like it gets a lot of productive human beings out of it. The problem is when that system works against you. And the reason for that is because that system has a short feedback cycle.

It's very immediate. And so it's very good for getting people to not jump into traffic, for getting kids to not put their fingers in electrical sockets, for kids to not try and look at the pasta when it's boiling from below. All of those things, those immediate feedback loops of punishment are very good. They change our behavior in a good way. The problem is that those feedback loops are far too short for the level of accomplishment that you want.

And so most of you could accomplish all the dreams you have if you just said, I'll give it 36 months. That disapproval, that shame, this is where you need to start decoupling your ego and your self-worth from what other people talk about.

Because they're going to disapprove of you. So rather than seeking approval, be willing to be misunderstood. And this is the second part of that statement that I started this with. You must first become consistent in order to become exceptional.

In the beginning, becoming exceptional is being an exception, which is sliding outside of societal norms. You're going to get feedback that tells you that this is a bad idea. And that's because a lot of times people aren't willing to take the risks that you are. And this is where they will chastise you for doing something that they're unwilling to do to get something that they know they can't get. If you want something that they don't have,

Then don't do what they do and don't listen to what they say. By definition, you will have to be an exception, especially if you're the first person in your family that's made any kind of wealth or wants to make any kind of wealth. You want to kind of break the generational tree that you have and plant a new start a new in order to do that, that your self-worth has to come from the work that you do.

from who you are. And the who you are only comes from the actions you take. For many of you, I think that you treat this opportunity, the life you have, the time we have, like the chicken. You're interested, but you're not committed. And I think if you were just committed and you were consistent, you eliminated the alternatives and you showed up every day,

It would happen significantly faster. But I think a large part of the entrepreneurial journey in the beginning is learning what commitment even means, is learning exactly how much volume it takes in order to get that first ding, that first dollar, and how much more it takes to get the next one. I say this because I think there's this mismatch of expectations. And I want you to win.

I think that the world does enough coddling. I try not to coddle. I just try to tell the truth. It's tough. It's hard. You're not going to know the answers. And battling the unknown is par for course for entrepreneurship. This is entrepreneurship. And one of my favorite stories, which I'll tell you right now. So years later, my father had me. And then I ended up going to college. And I ended up joining a fraternity. And then they ended up electing me president, which I was very grateful for. And every year...

every pledge class would have a revolt. And the thing is, is that every pledge class thought they were unique in revolting at some point, but every single class, every time would have this moment where they would say, this isn't what I signed up for. This is not fun. I can't talk to girls. I can't drink. You guys are just having me clean up all the time. You're driving me all over the place. I'm just, I'm mopping floors and doing errands. This sucks. When I was president, unsurprisingly, the pledge class that we had 20 something guys, uh,

revolted. And they said, we're, we don't want to do this anymore. We're out. I said, okay. And they said, we want to negotiate the terms of our, of our like settlement. And so they asked me to meet them in the freshman campus. So I was, I was on the other side of campus. I came over to the freshman dorms and all the guys are in one dorm and these dorms are not big. All right. So like they're, they're climbed, they're all others. There's a four, four bedroom bunk, four bunks. There's guys all over the place. Right. And it's me. And I took my VP with me.

And it's like you can imagine the setting, right? A ton of dudes and then just like me. Right. And I walk in. You could cut the tension. Everyone's angry and riled up. And, you know, they all kind of, you know, their pledge class president said there has said his bid. If like this isn't fair, blah, blah, blah. And I remember just like taking all of it and just taking a deep breath once they were kind of done airing their grievances.

And I paused and I was like, raise your hand if you thought this was going to be easy. No one raised their hands. I said, okay. I said, everything you just described, the feeling you have right now. I said, this is what hard feels like. And they all kind of like internalized that. I said, the complaints that you have are not new.

They're very old. And I'll ask you the next question, which is, if this were easy, would it have been worth it? And they said, no. And I said, would you respect all the guys in this house if they hadn't gone through something in order to earn these letters, this brand, this logo? They said, no. I said, okay. So wouldn't it be befitting that a very great achievement would be worthy of sacrifice? They were like, yeah.

And I was like, then this is the sacrifice you make. And in that setting, I said, you got to give eight weeks, give eight weeks. And then you have three and a half years of enjoying the benefits of pledges. You give eight, you give eight, you give one semester and you get seven. It's a pretty good trade. And so, of course, the guys all got back in and everything was fine and it went forward. But I think that many of you, when I see the comments and the complaints, honestly, the gripes, the grievances,

What you complain about is the price, the price tag. No one says, hey, I don't want to make money. They say, hey, I don't like the price of making money. Hey, I don't like the price of this influence that I want to have. I don't like the price of gaining this subscriber base. I don't like the price of running ads profitably, making $5 every dollar I put in. I don't like the price of learning how to do that. But the price is the suffering that you go through not knowing and embracing the uncertainty of not knowing how long you'll have to suffer.

It's not about not suffering. I think it's about finding something worthy of suffering for. And I think many of you have dreams that I would hope you believe are worth suffering for. I want to leave you with this, which is to encourage you that if you want what you say you want, then pay the price that you said you'd be willing to pay when you started. It's easier to say you'll wake up at 4 a.m. every day when you set your alarm than

But it's much harder when you actually have to hit the alarm and get out of bed. Many of you know the price, you know logically what the price is. But when you actually have to pay the price is when the bill comes due is when you guys don't want to take your wallet out. And so I would encourage you to push through that because you are not alone. You're not following a path that others haven't trod before you.