How I’m Scaling My Business from 7 to 8 Figures
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Hey friends, welcome back to Deep Dive, the podcast where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with entrepreneurs, creators, authors, and other inspiring people, and we find out how they got to where they are, and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love. In this video, we're looking back at previous episodes, where I look at the best advice on scaling a business from some of our previous guests. So without further ado, here we are. One of the observations I had shortly after my time at PayPal was that if you... First, I look back at my time at PayPal, and I realized like,

90% of all of our growth came from like five things. Oh, wait, how? So like, I mean, early on, before I got there, they got onto eBay and eBay sellers started using it. And then they wrote a bot to start bidding on eBay items and pretending to be a buyer and asking if they would accept PayPal. And the sellers were like, oh, yeah, sure.

And so eBay was a huge early growth engine. Then reaching out to web developers, because that's the people who are implementing e-commerce. And then we figured out that about the time I got there, they figured out that a lot of e-commerce sites just get built on a platform, like the early versions of Shopify type businesses. So we reached out to all the shopping carts and hosting companies and got pre-integrated with all of those.

And there were, you know, a few more things, international expansion and a few others, but really not many. Okay. And what's your sense of how many things the team tried to grow of which five worked? Right. So that's the rub, right? They didn't just do six things. When I left, they had 24,000 employees. They were spending $5 billion a year on stuff.

So they tried hundreds of things and launched dozens of products and wasted money on campaigns that didn't work. And it didn't matter because they were printing money. But if you're a little startup and you've got 12 months of runway and a million bucks in the bank, you don't have that luxury. So in order to be successful, you've got to figure out if you assume that 90% of your growth is going to come from 10% of the stuff you do, you've got to find that 10% as quickly as possible.

That's what we help startups do. 90% of your growth. This is like the 80/20 principle, just even more extreme than that. What other examples have you seen of this 90/10 principle in action when it comes to growing businesses? If you read the great startup case studies, you'll find something like this in all of them. For Dropbox, it was this kind of viral product-led referral loop that Sean Ellis helped them develop.

Canva, they have about 750,000 landing pages out there for search terms like award certificate template and birthday card template and all these things, social media, post design, whatever. And so people Google this stuff, they get to Canva. So that's part one. And then part two is they have an incredibly optimized self-serve onboarding experience. So you can just get in the tool with no Photoshop experience or anything and be successful right away.

So, you know, those are a couple of examples. But again, you know, if you study HubSpot or any of these great startups, you'll find things like this. Okay. So just sort of zooming out of it. So...

I have only recently learned that growth is a department in a business. I guess a few years ago when I started reading business books for the first time, I realized that sales and marketing were a thing. And I guess now that we're thinking about our business, we're thinking, okay, we kind of want a head of growth for each of our major product lines. And that person's role will be to try and grow the revenue of that particular product line.

And I guess thinking out loud downstream of that, they're like, okay, let's say the goal is to grow our YouTuber Academy from 3 million a year to 10 million a year. At that point, I guess this person figures out, okay, what is the menu of 100 possible things we could do? And then they figure out what's the three or four things that will actually do that. Is that the rough idea? Um,

So there's a few questions in there. You know, one is how does growth sit in the organization? And then two is kind of... Yeah, so let's take the first one here. Where does growth sit in the organization? How is it different to sales and marketing? What's the thing? It's really tricky. With most early stage startups, my advice is unless you've had a very good reason otherwise, your founder is your head of growth. Because a startup has one job. You know, a startup is a company that grows fast. It's built to grow fast.

And to do growth effectively, first of all, you need to really understand the business, every aspect from, you know, the board and the cashflow all the way through to the customers, every aspect of the product, every aspect of sales and marketing customer acquisition. The one person who can do that typically is the founder. You also need to be able to pull any and all of those levers, right?

And again, the one person in an organization who can tell an engineer to do one thing and tell a marketer to do another thing and tell the finance person, no, we're going to spend money on this, is the founder. So it's a weird thing to put in a department because it's so cross-functional. And even in larger orgs, that creates a problem. And like when I was at PayPal and building my team,

The number two thing I was always thinking about was how well is this person going to play with others? Can they build relationships? Can they get people in other departments to do things that their boss didn't tell them to do to help the greater good of the business? Okay. So in that sense, sales and marketing are a subset of growth? They're certainly a big piece of it, obviously. Yeah, customer acquisition. But depending on

your big levers and what they are, a lot of it could be driven by product. It could be driven by all sorts of things. Like let's take, do you know the company Wise here in London, money remittances company. So anyone who wants to work with a FinTech company, they have to go through this process called KYC, know your customer, which means that Wise is legally required to verify some documents, source of funds, who you are, you're not a fraudster or whatever.

So for most companies, that's just a giant pain and it's this thing you've got to do. But if you go to your head of compliance and you say, listen, your job isn't, you know, if you hire a head of compliance, they're going to want to do a good job and be 100% compliant. And if you go to them and say, listen, that's not your job. Your job is to get as many weekly active users or as much money going through our platform as possible while remaining compliant.

They're going to think about their job differently. So what Wise did was they smoothed out that process in a way and just really spent a lot of time on optimizing the user journey just to make that really painless and help people get up and running quickly. So in that sense, their compliance function became a component of their growth engine. Or another weird example,

is Spotify. So, you know, it was, it didn't take a genius to figure out that people would rather listen to streaming music than like buy albums and only listen to one song on it. Right. The problem was the record labels in the U S didn't want that to happen. So they started in Europe and they went into countries that have more favorable laws, eventually got enough momentum, enough of an audience, enough money and enough lawyers that they could then move in to the U S. And in that sense for a while, their growth team were their lawyers.

So it could be, I mean, I'm choosing extreme examples, but my point is it could be anywhere in the organization. So you need to sort of figure out from first principles, how does your business grow and then align whatever organizational pieces are required to make that happen. Thick. Okay. That's super interesting. All right. I'm sold. So then what does growth levers mean? And why is that the title of the book? And it's an American book. So they're levers for the record. Now it sounds so much better when you say it. Anyways, levers. Okay.

So these levers are, or levers or whatever they are, this is the work. These are the things, the actions that will have the biggest impact on the growth of your business that you need to identify. Sure.

Okay. So how do we do that? So how do you do that? There's four steps to the process. The first step, why is it levers and process and not levers and process? Anyway, there's four steps to this process. The first thing, which I think we're going to do today, is you sort of map your growth model, which is a mathematical representation of how your business acquires and delights and engages and retains and monetizes customers. Okay.

And once you've got some data in there, you can sort of mathematically derive where are the points of highest leverage. Okay. Step two is you need to really understand your customer's journey, which has nothing at all to do with your product. Nobody, if you're a startup, nobody woke up in the morning looking for your product. Yep.

Often nobody even woke up in the morning looking for your category, but clearly you could help these people if only they knew you existed. So you've got to figure out what were they trying to do? What do they think they were looking for? Where were they looking for it? And you know, what questions would they have and how can you sort of turn up there and look like that thing?

Okay.

But the place I'm going to be when I suddenly realize I need a locksmith is right here locked out of my flat. Right.

And so I was like, okay, that's a perfect example of growth hacking because you figured out what are you going to be looking for and where are you going to be when you suddenly realize you need it and just turn up there and look like that thing. Yeah, because no one wakes up in the morning thinking I need a locksmith. They rock up at their door realizing I need a locksmith. And if the guy's number's there, it's like, oh, I might as well call that number. And if you heard a podcast and a locksmith sponsored it yesterday, you're not going to remember that. So step two is to map your customer journey. We use a technique called jobs to be done interviews.

Step three then is you're going to have lots of ideas. And so you're going to want to filter down the ideas first by looking at your growth model and saying, which of these will have the biggest impact? Which of these are focused on our rate limiting step where we can have the biggest impact on the business? And then you're still going to have more ideas and most of them are going to be bad. So the next thing you got to do is experiment quickly. So step three is to design and run growth experiments as quickly as possible.

Nice. And that's tricky because a lot of the ideas you're going to have are hard. I'm going to publish a book. That takes a long time, right? I'm going to do this or that, whatever. It takes a lot of money. Going to build some product. All those things are hard. And you've got to find a way to test them in like a week or two. Oh, okay. So the way you'll do that is you'll look at this idea and you'll say, okay, all the things, the moving parts of this, what are the risky assumptions here?

What are the risky assumptions? So if you're going to publish a book and suppose maybe you just really wanted to write a book, but maybe you're hoping the book's going to be a creative to your business. Yeah. So in my, in my case, we sell a productivity community course thing and I'll think, great, let me publish a book about productivity, which will take me three and a half years because hopefully people will read the book and then they'll sign up to my course. Okay. Great idea. Right. So what are the risky assumptions here? Uh, that Ali can write a book reasonably quickly, that it won't distract him from running his business, that,

People actually want to buy the book. People will like the book. And the people who like the book will then sign up and take your course. Yeah, all of these are quite risky assumptions. Okay, there's a lot of risky assumptions in there. The only way to test them all would be to write a book. But could you isolate one of those assumptions and find a way to test it? Could you find a way to figure out in a week how hard writing a book is? Or...

whether people would like a particular book title idea or a topic idea, or whether people who bought a book would then go, someone else's book maybe would go on and buy a course. Yeah. So if I were thinking out loud with this example, uh, I would be thinking, who do I know who has both a book and a course? And in my position, I can just email them and be like, Hey, quick question. To what extent did the book contribute to your course sales? Um,

I happen to know a handful of people who do this. Some of them have said it basically did nothing because they already had a YouTube channel. And the other one said it was massive because they didn't have a YouTube channel.

Those are like the two categories of like four people that I've spoken to for whom this scenario applies. Okay, great. So you've now, in a week, de-risked or ruled out a bad idea or de-risked an assumption. So for each of your experiments that you're most excited about, you figure out what's the quickest way we can test this. That's step three. And we can come back to any of these, obviously. But then step four is a mindset shift. So it turns out that to grow a startup quickly...

You pretty much have to have the exact opposite mindset that it would take to be successful in school or successful in a normal job. Oh, tell me more. And as you can imagine, people have trouble with this. So what do you do? You were a good student in school. How do you succeed in school? You learn all the things really quickly, really thoroughly, and you remember them and you apply them without making any mistakes.

Suppose you get a job as a consultant or a banker, an engineer, whatever. So how do you get promoted in a company? You do all the things they ask you to do, plus a few more things. You do them really, really well and you don't make any mistakes. Okay, so now you come into a startup and the deck is stacked against you. You can't do all the things that you know you should do. You've never done this before, so you're absolutely going to make mistakes and you need to move quickly, which means you can't do all the things and you've got to make mistakes.

And the value is those mistakes because each of those mistakes brings a little bit of learning and gets you actually closer to your goal. In theory, provided you learn from the mistake. Provided you learn from the mistake.

And then only like two years later, we will remember, oh yeah, we did that thing. And we, yeah, we really should have written down what the, what we learned from that because, because, because we've just made that mistake again. Actually, that was part of the experiment process is document your experiments and document your learnings. But it's even worse with the mindset piece because someone who is afraid to make mistakes and thinks they're going to get, you know, a bad grade or fired or something, isn't going to talk about them.

And then you're not going to learn from them. And then someone else is going to go make that mistake again. I always admired Apple because I don't think most people realize this, but Apple is playing a much harder game than any other company in tech. So Salesforce.com pushes out some software. Oops, there's a bug. Someone pulls an all-nighter and they push an update the next morning. Everything's fine.

Apple shipping hardware. Once those iPhones leave the factory and 10 million of them or whatever and go into stores, there's no fixing them. You'd have to get everyone to update their iOS. Everything has to work perfectly. They're incredibly complicated devices. They do software and hardware. The software and hardware have to work together.

And the timing has to be perfect. So their revenue forecast, they'll say, okay, we're going to ship on December 10th. We have 21 days before the end of the fiscal year to make our money. We'll make a hundred million in iPhone sales per day. If we ship a day late, we miss our earnings number by a hundred million, right? Like it has to be perfect. And they do it every time. And when Steve Jobs was alive, almost every product they launched was successful, which is the complete opposite of every other company. And I was always wondering, how do they do that?

And so I worked with a guy at PayPal named Alan Olivo, who used to work for Steve. And I pulled him aside one day and I said, how does Apple do it? And he said, Matt, it's so simple. He said, Steve stands up at the beginning of the year. And he said, this year is about version two of the iPhone.

This year, we're going to make an MP3 player a thousand songs in your pocket. Whatever the thing for the year was, he'd stand up. There's one thing. And Steve was not a nice, patient man. And you knew if you, that one thing was your job. And if you were doing anything else, you were going to get fired.

And it was that simple. And everyone who came in in the morning, you know, and if you're in procurement, you're procuring parts for the new iPhone. Everyone knew exactly what they had to do because it was so simple. And that's a company that had 30,000 people and $37 billion in revenue. And that focus just becomes so critical. And so that's why, as we're going, I'm going to keep asking you to peel things back, consolidate and simplify. Perfect. So.

All right. So back to the North Star then. I think how you measure it might be hard, but it could either be something about number of lives changed or, you know, number of true fans or something that reflects the purpose. I guess one thing to think about is life changing is kind of a discrete event, but I get the sense that your customers are kind of always on a journey. Yeah. Good point. That's a very good point. So whatever you end up naming it, I like the idea of having something on mission. It's the number of people that you're helping achieve their goals in some form.

How you measure it, and I don't want to get into all the weeds of, well, what behavior on Twitter indicates they're a true fan versus just... But you know you've got over 5 million followers, but every video you put up doesn't get 5 million views. So there's some subset of those followers and those email subscribers and whatever other platforms you're on, podcasts, who are true fans, and there's some who aren't.

And it would be helpful to come up with some proxy metrics that you can hide all this complexity from the team, but you and Angus have some proxy metrics that you'll sort of know, this is roughly the ratio of, you know, for however many views we get, however many subscribers we get, this is how many of those are true fans, and you can sort of de-dupe across platforms. Yeah.

Wait, you can sort of what across platform? You can sort of use estimates to dedupe across platforms. So someone who's deduplicate. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. Because some people are going to like your podcast and your channel and some people are going to be only podcasts and only channel. Yeah. But you'll still get a directionally accurate number. I feel like I've tried doing this so many times and I've never landed on like a number that feels even vaguely, even vaguely legit unless I'm overthinking it and

Yeah. That's what I'm worried about. If you can come up with rough proxies, I think it'll give you a sense for it. Enough to steer the business. I mean, there are numbers that if they move in the extreme, it's going to be obvious.

And if they don't move in the extreme, you're not making progress towards your goal. So don't worry about it. What are some other companies as North Star Metrics? Just so you can give me a flavor of what's the sort of thing we should be thinking about for North Star Metric? So I'm thinking whether the analogy is right or wrong. I'm thinking about your business like a software company. Because a software company or a meditation app is going to want to have weekly active users.

weekly active consumers of their content. And so that's what I'm thinking about. Is the right cadence for your customers weekly, daily, or monthly? Probably monthly. Okay. Then you're going to have something like monthly active listeners or consumers of content. We do have a metric hidden deep within YouTube analytics, which is monthly returning viewers. Okay. That could be very useful. That's probably a reasonable proxy for true fans. Yeah. Yeah.

Because if that number were to grow 10x, we would be getting millions of views on each video. So what do we call that? So you said monthly... Monthly returning viewers. Yeah, that's people who are... Yeah. I mean, I can start quibbling with that and think, well, someone might have gotten a lot of value from the content three years ago, but they're not getting it now. In which case, they wouldn't show up in that number. They're not returning. Probably a good thing, yeah. In that they shouldn't show up in that number because we're not continuing to provide value to them. Because if we were, they would be a monthly returning viewer. And so...

Yeah, monthly returning viewers. That's probably, we can go with that for now. Okay. Yeah. Do you want to stress test that? Is there anything about that that makes you nervous? One thing about it that makes me nervous is the fact that stuff that helps grow a YouTube channel is often different to stuff that keeps people wanting to watch. So for example, returning viewers are way more likely to want to watch my vlog or I document my life and stuff. But a new viewer doesn't give a shit what my vlog is because they don't know who I am.

A new viewer is more likely to click on a video titled something like, I don't know, nine passive income ideas. But a returning viewer might sigh a bit internally and think, oh, he sold out. That he's like, oh, he's doing another one of these videos just to get the views.

So the incentives of appealing to the existing audience versus trying to get new audiences sort of feel like they're often adults. I don't know if other companies have this as well. I'm sure they probably do. But are they actually at odds? Like if someone sees another nine passive income ideas video, are they going to unfollow you or are they going to be a true fan and see what your next video is and watch it if it's what they like? If, no, in fairness, if they felt sufficiently high trust with me that they knew that every time Ali puts out a video, it's at least worth seeing what he's talking about.

rather than writing it off by just looking at the title, then yeah, they would probably watch at least some of it. Or unless they're in the sort of, I don't know, 60% of our audience who, you know,

Like there are various members of my team, for example, who wouldn't click on a video just purely because of the topic. They wouldn't click on the passive income ideas video because they care more. They're not like they don't aspire to be entrepreneurs. So only aspiring entrepreneurs really are going to click on that video. The people who are like, you know what? I just want to chill nine to five job where I'm doing work I'm proud of and I've got a work life balance and I can chill with the boys in the evening.

So that's a significant chunk of my audience that would not click on that particular video, even though that video might get like, I don't know, 5 million views from other people outside of that core audience. Okay. So there's a piece of this model we're going to have to think about, which is how do you get loyal subscribers? How do you get followers? And then there's going to be this other piece, which is how do you engage them and retain them? And then there's going to be this other piece, which is how do you monetize them?

Yeah, nice. I mean, I think it's that simple, right? That's pretty simple. Get viewers engaged and retain and monetize. Yeah. The other thing that makes me nervous about viewers as a metric, as a North Star metric, is that I worry that that will get me on the hamster wheel of feeling the pressure that every video I make has to then hit a certain view count, which to me is always something that I've rebelled against because...

It sort of takes some of the joy out of creating the videos to worry about like, well, what's this going to do to our view target kind of thing? So remember, these are going to be returning visitors. So the goal is to deliver a drumbeat of content that they find valuable rather than, you know, one specific hit.

Yeah, good point. I'm guessing because, you know, I see this with my LinkedIn posts that I just have bangers that generate the lion's share of my impressions, the lion's share of my audience. And I have other ones that mostly just my loyal readers engage with. Yep.

And, you know, no matter how clever I try to be and make them all bangers, I'm just not. And then when I analyze other people's content, I see they all have roughly the same distribution. People who I think are much better creators than me also have their duds and also have their bangers. But ultimately, the more videos you make, the more good videos you're going to make. Yeah.

And also, if I think of monthly returning viewers, one question we've been thinking about to get really inside baseball here is like, should we put our vlogs on the main channel or on our second vlog channel? And I've sort of been wanting to put them on the main channel.

because they get more views and it's like it's kind of nice and feels cool to have a big youtube channel that has some sit down talk to camera educational bits but also some more chilled out bits that are a bit more lifestyley and stuff and a lot of the core true fans love the vlogs because they think oh my god i love seeing what ali's up to but they get like they're guaranteed to get way fewer views than uh sit down and talk to the camera and explain how to make more money video

But I like putting the vlogs in there as well. So it would be nice for the monthly returning viewers metric, to be honest, to be able to put the vlogs there. I mean, so that is, is there a way to do an experiment and find out if that's a good idea or not? Yeah, we're doing that for the next probably few months to put vlogs in the main channel instead of the second channel and see what happens. Okay. Yeah. So this does get easier. The North Star is definitely the hardest piece of this. And once you've done that, most of it kind of naturally flows from this. Okay.

I think it's a little ambitious to think we're going to be able to tightly define the North Star. These metrics from this system average over 90 days or whatever. Yeah. I think we can agree on the principle that it's going to be some measurement of who are people who remember you and know you and like you and loyally consume your content, presumably because they find it helpful. Yeah. Yeah.

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When investing, your capital is, of course, at risk, and you might get back less than you invest. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and terms and fees apply. And you'll find all the details in the video description and on the Trading212 website. Cool. So thanks, Trading212, for sponsoring this episode, and let's get back to it. A lot of people who watch my stuff aspire to the whole financial freedom thing, where they're like, oh, if only I had the business that made passive income, I'd be able to do whatever I want, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. And it's like, well, when you ask, like, well, what do you want? It's like,

I don't know, just being able to not do things I don't want to have to do. It's like, okay, but then what do you want to do? It's like, it becomes quite confronting in a way. What was your experience with that? Well, and it's such a funny thing because I feel like everybody misses that chapter the first time they read the book. They just focus on the, how do I make a bunch of passive income? And then if they get it,

Basically, everybody realizes that they're just not very happy in that life. It's fun for like three, six, 12 months. You do the traveling, you do the, you know, taking whatever random classes you want, playing with your hobbies, and then you feel kind of empty inside. And you realize that meaningful work is a core part of human fulfillment, right?

And what I realized, you know, first back then was that just doing these things to get some passive income so that I could quit doing them was really a losing proposition because doing a bunch of work that you don't really want to do so that you don't have to do work that you don't want to do is kind of this like silly trade off if you have the option to make it. And

It that was the first time when I was like, OK, I should try to actually work on something long term or something that I could actually keep working on year after year after year after year after year and enjoy working on it, because that's where you're actually going to get this long term happiness. And the thing that nobody in the passive income world wants to tell you is that there's really no such thing as passive income.

Because the minute you let it go passive, it starts dying. It starts just slowly going down and it will trickle away. Other people will come in and eat your lunch. Your work will get stale. Your products will get stale. You'll get beaten out on Amazon or for your courses or for your SEO or whatever. And in two years, you're going to be back where you started before you built the thing.

So you better use those two years to get somewhere interesting. Because if you think that you can just gallivant around living this funded lifestyle forever, you're actually going to be worse off than where you started at the end of it. Because not only will you be back to square one without the passive income, you'll have now lost two, three, four years of your life. So

Where I think the passive income four-hour workweek lifestyle business stuff is very useful is a way to bootstrap working on something bigger. So if you know that you want to be a writer or a painter or a YouTuber or any of these careers with a long startup time to pay your bills, doing the lifestyle business first...

to fund you for two years while you get that going is actually pretty smart. I mean, same thing with a startup, right? If you can do the lifestyle business to give you some runway to actually work on a startup so that you don't have to take money right away and don't have to dilute yourself, that's an incredibly good use case. But trying to fill the void with experiences and novelty is

does get old really, really quickly. And you have to be ready for that. And I don't tell people not to do it. I don't tell them not to chase it because nobody believes you when you say that, right? They're like, like, yeah, you got tired of it, but I won't. Like, I love traveling. I love going to new restaurants. I love doing these things. And it's like,

Yeah, you love them because they're a break from the work that you don't enjoy doing and because they're occasional things. When that's your whole life, you're going to get bored really quickly, but you have to go experience it to realize that that's the case. But then once you have that little inkling, don't feel guilty about it. Accept it. Say, cool, I checked this box and now I have this runway to go do this big thing that I was scared of doing before, but I now have the means to do. And boom.

go do that thing. Nice. Yeah, that's great. Um,

Well, Finite and Infinite Games. You talk about this book, I think, in one of your YouTube videos from back in the day. I talk about it everywhere. This is one of my favorite books. You talk about it everywhere. Yeah, I've never read the book, but what should I understand or what should listeners understand about the idea of Finite versus Infinite Games? So it's a wonderful book. It's very short. It's weird and philosophical, but also very tactical in its own way. And the core thesis of the book is that

Everything that you do in life is a kind of game, right? So this conversation that we're having for your podcast, for your YouTube is a game of sorts. And there are two ways to think of games. A finite game has a closed boundary. It has a winner and loser. It has clear rules.

And you there's a way to like succeed or fail. There's an end to it. All these things are like a football game is itself a finite game because there will be a winner or loser at the end of it. If I came into this conversation with a finite game mentality of I need to like win this conversation, I'd be very focused on like, you know, slipping crypto confidential into everything that I talk about.

Yeah, exactly. Like buy the book, right? Like, you know, if you buy by the end of this podcast, you're going to get 10, you know, whatever, right? Like you'd be milking it for all that it's worth. But if you take a more infinite game approach to something like this, your only goal is to basically like have fun. The reason you play an infinite game is to keep the game going. It's to continue to extend the boundaries and the realm of play.

And if you're thinking about it that way, where it's not transactional, it's not a winner or loser, you behave very differently. Because the only thing that I'm focused on right now is like having a fun conversation with you. And if the book comes up, great. If it doesn't, I also don't care because like we're friends, we've known each other on the internet for years. Like we're just having a good time and like hopefully it's valuable to people too.

which means that we're going to have a lot more conversations over the course of our life. Like this game that we are playing together of being, you know, internet creators, book writers, whatever, can continue to expand infinitely as we continue to support each other over the course of our hopefully very, very long careers.

And you can think of so many things in your life this way, right? Like even the sports analogy, right? If you're constantly focused on winning this tennis match, then your emotion, your identity and everything is tied to the outcome of each match. But if the game that you're playing is getting better at tennis...

then whether you win or lose the individual game, you're still winning at the infinite game of getting better and better. Or if your infinite game is just that I love to hit the ball, right? There's this wonderful Djokovic interview where he's like, my advantage is that I just love hitting the ball. And that's why he's like one of the best tennis players in the world. And...

If you can think about it that way, then you're less attached to short-term outcomes and you end up like winning more of these little finite games along the way because you're not attached to their individual outcomes. And so he ties this into so many things. He ties it into relationships, right? Like, you know, the best way to...

to find a partner or to have a successful date is to not be trying to make it a successful date, right? It's to like, just be yourself and be interested in them and like have a conversation and not be, you know, checking the watch and wondering if you're going to get to go home with them and like trying to, you know, get something out of it, right? If you're,

You know, if you're if you're working on YouTube videos, right, like playing the infinite game of trying to make each video a little bit better is going to pay off a lot more in the long run than being obsessed over every single video hurting hitting like a very specific metric. You know, me as a writer, like, I hope that this book does good. I want it to do good, but I'm in this for the rest of my life at this point. And so I know that.

by focusing so much more of my energy on making the best book possible, instead of on milking as many sales from it as possible, that's going to set me up for many, many great books in the future and over a long term that's going to compound into more and more interesting things. So that book is just so good at showing you all of the parts of your life

where you could be thinking on this more infinite horizon instead of constantly being attached to winning whatever little thing you're in in that moment. Creating a baseline level of financial security such that you...

don't have to worry about where your expenses are going to be handled, I do think has like a totally different like impact on stress. And so, and Patrick's gone into a lot deeper research on this at all kinds of levels. But I do think that like,

having a thoughtful plan, whether you do what's in Tim Ferriss' book for our work week, Tony Robbins has a book of just like creating just like a basic financial plan and then creating the resources that gives you that fundamental security.

is a wise approach and does change baseline levels of concern. This is like practically, I don't think enough people talk about that needs to get done as sort of a first baseline step. Like if you're at the point where you're worried about paying your bills, then obviously getting more money is going to make you way happier because now you've removed all that stress from your life. Yeah.

And then I also have witnessed people, even after huge exits, who will let a level of lifestyle creep go beyond where their incredible means take them. And the fundamental concerns about do I have enough will sort of persist despite having created an incredible outcome. - Okay.

So as you get more money, kind of keeping your lifestyle costs fairly in check is an important part of that. It sounds like it's an important part of that kind of not being stressed out by money kind of piece. Yeah. I mean, if you're, for example, able to live, uh, uh, after like, like once you can get to a point where your expenses are 4% of whatever you have saved, that is a fundamentally like different just as a general rule. Uh, um, yeah.

you know, as long as you're sort of thoughtfully investing, that's a secure, you know, and sustainable sort of place to be. Yeah. Wealth impacts you to the level of your insecurity. That's really where it comes from. Like, if you think about

The reason I would posit that the $10,000 per month videos do better is not only because it seems more achievable, but because $10,000 in passive income takes care of a massive amount of people. And all of a sudden getting to a hundred thousand is nice to have. And maybe there's a thing that they could think about that they would purchase, but

A lot of people, thankfully, are pretty well adjusted if getting an extra $120,000 a year. What I have found is that wealth beyond $10,000 a month, $100,000 a month, and so on and so forth, it really impacts or the changes that start to impact you are at the level of where that insecurity is. So to give you an example, like

I know, I have friends who have had similar exits to us and they are numbers people, meaning that number needs to constantly be going up. Objectively, the number does not need to be going up. They're not purchasing anything that would need the number to go up. There's nothing that they want to buy that they would want to buy.

demand that particular number, but that number gives them some sort of like purpose. And this is not healthy. It's just, it gives them some sort of purpose and maybe they convince themselves that's the game that they want to play and they get enjoyment and maybe they actually do get enjoyment, but there's something in their psyche. There's something in how they were, they were, they were built or developed depending on the nature versus nurture debate that has now caused them to essentially need to chase that.

And I think that that's something that as you get to these higher levels of wealth, it

It's, you know, it's again, it's hard to empathize with, but it is something that's interesting to kind of understand. But the one thing a lot of people should realize, if you're getting to the 10,000, you will look to the 100,000. As you're getting closer to the 100,000, you will look to the million. And you need to kind of stop yourself and realize like, ask yourself why. And most people will kind of pull back because what I have found is wealth is not a replacement for purpose.

And oftentimes people look at it as a replacement for purpose and they'll go chase something and then they won't necessarily feel something. The reason I didn't feel something is because again, I wasn't hugged enough as a child, but also because

the journey, you know, this whole cliche of it's the journey, not the destination was really, really true. So when the wire hit, I didn't feel like I, you know, won the lottery because it was like, yeah, like maybe the numbers are bigger than I thought that they were going to be, but I just did all this work for 10 years. And so there should be some outcome, right? So it was like, that's the thing. So it

And to give a little bit of an anecdote, so before I sold the company and I was debating whether we should sell the company or not, I talked to 30 other founders and I asked them, you know, and they all sold their companies for different amounts of money. I asked them, would you sell again? 15 of them said, yeah, absolutely. It was the best decision. Get the bag, et cetera. The other 15 said they wouldn't.

And of those 15, eight, seven or eight went with the company post-sale, meaning like they sold the company and then they worked at the company that bought them. And they said a lot of things about it was miserable, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The other seven or eight didn't go with the company. And that group, at least qualitatively, was the most miserable. They had all this money and then they were sitting there and they're like, they had lost their purpose. And they were like, well,

I thought the money was important and they de-risked their lives, bought a house, whatever it is. But now like I lost the thing that I was doing and now I'm just going to try to go rebuild that, but I had already built it. So what am I doing? And then unfortunately of those seven, three or four of them became substance abuse, like drug addicts or alcoholics. They're all good now, but it was, it was pretty intense for those three or four. And so I think that

Wealth isn't a replacement for purpose is a really really important thing to keep in mind and unfortunately It's probably one of those wisdom things you can't really learn it until you experience it But you'll listen and be like a bearded guy said this and so hopefully it saves you a cycle or two I had to feel it myself as well, but I want to tell a similar story that so I had a Mentor in my life. He's now in his 70s and

He had the wisdom in his early 20s to say, I want to have a two-part life. He wrote a business plan for his life at age 23, which was by age 40, he wanted to become an entrepreneur, build a business, and have an exit by age 40. And he named the number he wanted to exit for back when he was 23.

And he felt like it was reasonable, it was achievable. Let's call it in today's dollars maybe high single digit millions. And he's had the wisdom at age 23 to say,

I am going to say that's enough for me. And I will always potentially want... A well-adjusted here. Right, right. A 23. I never would have thought this at 23. So he is actually at Harvard Business School while he writes this plan.

Uh, um, he got in on like an engineering scholarship and you know, uh, he's at HPS at 23 as well. Yeah. Right. Uh, and he writes this plan, he goes ahead and he executes it at age 39 a year early. He sells for, and he hits his number and, um, uh,

He shifts into the second part of his career, which was purpose driven. He decided intellectually he always wanted to. He loved the law. He went to law school in his early 40s and he became a lawyer who basically took on cases to sort of help, you know, defend people who and he.

is one of the most like sort of purpose driven and happy people in his life. But now he's running for president. Oh, but why, how did he pull it off? Cause I've thought of like, how does he pull this off? Right. Because I'm here, we're in this amazing place. Right. And like,

Two rows down there are houses that are three times as much that I could be pulled to want more. Right. And so I try to remember this guy because, uh, um, the purpose part of his life has guided him. I think the way he's stayed on track to me is for two reasons. Uh, and you're an atomics habits fan. So I, I think it's in there. So number one, number one,

he defined the, his identity in life later as having been living in, you know, consistent with this purpose of having a second career and helping people. Number two, uh,

He knew that his environment would matter. He moved out of like, uh, the town he lived in in St. Louis after he had this exit, he moved to Wyoming where the currency, uh, of his community was going to be health being active and, you know, not the rat race of, you know, the, the, the business community he was in about what are you doing next? Uh, what have you. So he literally made his environment be thoughtfully surrounded with people who were not going to

sort of challenge his intention of more, more, more, more, more. So he's, yeah, that story, uh, I think has a lot of lessons that 20 years before, you know, James Clear was putting this out, uh, and how it applies to money. He lived. Just makes me feel broken. But I think that what's really interesting about that, and you and I were talking about this is like that, like,

Like you and I have done an incredible amount of like introspection over the past couple of years. And, you know, if you're watching this, you probably are someone who does introspection. Obviously, you've done a lot of introspection. And I think that that that makes me spark a question in my head that we're not going to settle, unfortunately, here, which is like, can you get to that level of like peace?

Or is it something that it's almost easier to assume you can't get to that level of peace, therefore how should you live your life, right? So what I mean is I've done a lot of introspection over the past year to get to what drives me, what motivates me, what is the next thing, do I need a next thing, all of those other things.

But I don't know if I could ever get to that. And it's limiting belief at least, but I don't know if I can ever get to that level of peace. Like the best thing I've gotten to is I like increasing like concentric circles of freedom, meaning like I am able to do this. Now I want to, um, try to solve this small scale problem in my town. And then I want to be able to solve a larger scale problem. Like that type of stuff motivates me, but I still have this like energy where, um, I

it's, it's, it's, it's an anxiety where there has to be something more like there isn't a contentment and it could be an age thing. I don't have kids yet, all these other things, but yeah, it's a really, like, I want to meet this person. I hope you can intro me. I just want to like go and drive up or fly up and be like, just tell me, tell me how you got here. Like that type of a thing. I mean, but one of the things that I don't think he would put it in these terms, but, uh, he would say, uh,

Like he hacked his brain back to identity and said, part of who I am is going to be somebody who like, like thinks this way, does this thing. You could always want more. And so if he,

And he's public about that. It was literally written into a paper that his professor saw, right? And like publicly knew, right? So he could, if he was going to go in a pursuit of more, at least financially, then he would be essentially living in contrast to his identity. And, you know, it's something that I thought about related to like some of the things we were talking about for you this weekend is like, if you're,

clearly defined identity and purpose is measured totally on impact or spending your time on teaching or, or, or, or what have you. And it's explicitly not financial beyond a certain point. Yeah. And then that's public. Uh, um,

One of the benefits of creating and saying stuff publicly is it can be scaffolding to keep you consistent. And in ways like before the internet and social media with the community and people he had in his life, he put that out there, which created a little, I think, like identity scaffolding and support. I think the quick getting to the point where finances...

are not driving decision making as quickly as humanly possible is the path. Now, one step or two steps down from that is where I would consider myself and five steps down from that is where this friend you're describing is. Where I'm at is like, I don't have to do anything, but there are things that I would like to unlock

with what I have or what I could get, et cetera. And I think that that first level is where everyone can get either by getting content with, you know, their 40,000 or 40,000 pound, you know, salary per year, or, um, you know, doing some of this introspection of like, what's really important. And you and I have talked a lot about this the past year of like, how important it is to just think about what do you want? Yeah.

And then work backwards. And that's what it sounds like this person has done to a level that, you know, very few people even get close to, which is really, really thankful.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode.

So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.