- Some people they're kinda playing, they're dabbling.
They're not really being in the business.
They kinda like have ideas about being in business,
but they're not showing up and attacking things.
(upbeat music)
Hey, there everybody, Dan here.
Today I wanna talk about
the mindset of motivation. trumps knowledge.
You know, I get asked all the time,
because I've built multimillion dollar companies
and scaled teams and built marketing programmes
and I've got this YouTube channel,
people ask me all the time.
It's like, where do I learn how to do stuff?
And you know, I obviously would love them
to consume every one of my videos,
but the truth is, is what I've discovered for success
it's not about what you know, it's how you show up.
When I was 18, I actually cold called 20 different
kinda not billionaires, some of them were billionaires.
So I cold called Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Cuban.
And I literally found a list
of like the 20 richest people in tech
or like most notable people.
And I asked them the question.
I said, you know, I'm a young entrepreneur.
If I was trying to be successful,
what is the thing that's gonna allow me to stand out?
Is it what I know, is it who I know, or is it my motivation?
And I got very few replies.
I think I probably got seven or eight replies out of 20.
So it's not nothing.
The one that I love the best was Mark Cuban actually said,
"Do all three when everybody else is trying to pick one."
But I really lean into that
because over the years I've discovered
it's not what you know,
'cause if it was true,
then you'd have a bunch of millionaire PhD doctorates
in universities, right?
If it was just about knowledge,
then people that read a thousand books
would just magically be successful.
And what I've I discovered is
if you're struggling with fear, uncertainty,
imposter syndrome, self-doubt,
the truth is, is we need overcome that.
We need to overcome that through motivation.
I'm gonna share three specific strategies
to help you go from a place where you're feeling like,
"I'm not sure if I'm built for this,
I'm not sure if my family's gonna support me."
to a place of confidence,
where you wake up and you just know you're on your path,
you know, you're on your journey.
You know that it feels right.
And I remember the first time that I really understood this.
I was building a company called Sphere Technologies.
I had saved, at that point I was 23/24.
I'd saved 75K.
I worked for three years saving all my money.
I start this company.
I go back to the first place I'd ever worked.
I reach out to my buddies
that essentially I started the job with
to try to recruit them away
to join me on this crazy journey.
They were 22 years old at the time.
And I remember asking the two guys like,
'cause I needed three people, okay?
Well, four total, but three to join.
And I asked the two guys like,
who is the other person that you work with
that you think is like motivated
and would like jive well with us?
And I had this like really, you know,
I had customers lined up, I just needed people.
And they said, "Oh, there's this guy, Andrew at work.
Let me talk to him and see if he'd be interested."
And they reached out to him,
got him to kind of take an interest.
I had a meeting with him and I could just tell like,
okay, this is a guy that gets it, right?
He's young, he's motivated,
he had some real estate projects he's working on.
He's just somebody that's a hustler.
He's gonna do what's gonna take to be successful.
So I offered them the job,
and I mean this is a big deal for him, right?
He was leaving a really great opportunity,
just like the other two guys,
to join this crazy startup that had no revenue, no customer.
It was literally day zero.
And I remember messaging him on the weekend saying,
hey man, I'll stop over on Sunday with some paperwork,
like some generic legal stuff
I probably found on legalzoom.com.
And I show up to his house.
First off, I thought it'd be an apartment,
'cause I lived in an apartment.
I show up to his place, it's a house.
I knock on the door and I'm waiting.
And all of a sudden this little blonde-headed girl
opens the door, and I'm like, oh!
I go, is Andrew here?
And she turns around and she screams, "Dada!"
And I'm like, oh geez!
I didn't know Andrew had kids.
And then Andrew comes up from downstairs.
It was like a split entrance front,
like a house split entrance.
And his wife comes out of the kitchen, she's up top,
and she's full pregnancy mode,
like seven or eight months pregnant.
And I just look at Andrew and he looks at me.
He's like, "Oh you met my daughter and my wife,"
and I'm just like, yeah!
What Andrew didn't know is I didn't realise he had kids.
And I don't know about you, but like when you do things,
when you take action, when you move things forward,
and you have a certain assumption
about like the impact of the downside,
like, my downside in my life at that point
is I'll just go get another job, right?
And that's true for a lot of people,
but here's a person that just left
one of arguably the best places to work
in the city he lived in to go join me,
unproven, two failed startups at that point,
a dream, some motivation.
And I just remember there was something that clicked for me
where I was like getting him to sign that paperwork
meant that there was no messing around this time.
There was no way I could not make it work.
And what happened is three to four months later
we were, you know, had the money, hired the people,
got the laptops, we were flying around,
we were meeting with customer, and things were going good.
But what I didn't realise at the time
was the way I structured the business,
the way I invoiced our customers,
and the timing of them paying me
I got to a place where I had a cashflow problem.
And my dad if he's listening to this he'd smile
because he used to say this to me all the time,
"You gotta manage cash flow, you gotta watch your cash flow.
It's not what you make, it's what you keep.
It's when it comes in."
And I was like, don't worry about it.
I had customers lined up
and literally the thing he warned me against happened,
which is the way we were working with customers,
where we would hire people, train them,
I put them on payroll from day one.
It took me like six weeks to get them to a place
where they understood the technology.
Got them working on site, had to spend the money,
fly them there, work with the client, instal the software,
get things going.
Eventually invoice, right?
So you like sign the contract, eventually invoice.
Then there's this thing called net 30.
So they've got 30 days to pay the invoice.
Then they're paying with the check
and then the check comes in the mail.
And because I was a new company
when I went to deposit in my bank account,
the bank says that, "We do a 20 business day hold
on the check."
Now I'll tell you one thing,
I can be patient to get paid, your team won't be.
And when all of a sudden they're demanding,
and look, I was definitely nervous.
They didn't demand anything,
but I just literally looked at that 75 grand
just windle down to nothing.
And I got super motivated.
I got super focused.
I got super, out of fear at the time,
just driven to solve this problem.
And I picked up the phone, I called anybody could help me.
Like, hey, I've got these receivables
where the business is going,
but I'm literally gonna run outta money to make payroll
and I can't do that to my team.
And through a bunch of conversations
with some of my mentors, I realised that there's this thing,
well, they told me there's this thing
called factoring, okay?
Factoring is essentially a payday loan for businesses
where you can go to a place or to a company
and they will buy your receivables,
so they will buy it from you.
So you issue the money that the company owns to you,
but they'll take like 25, 30, 40% of the money.
So if you need cash today in your business
and you got receivables,
there are companies out there that will buy them.
It'll cost you a tonne of money.
The risk is still on you.
If they don't get paid, they still come to you.
You still guarantee that they're gonna get paid,
which is crazy,
and I ended up solving the problem.
I solved the problem because I was motivated.
And I think that's what happens is,
some people they're kinda playing, they're dabbling.
They're not really being in the business.
They kinda like have ideas about being in business,
but they're not showing up and attacking things.
And that's what that situation taught me,
is that if I want something, I need to show up
as if somebody else's livelihood dependent on it,
and it did at that time.
You need to show up for your customers,
you need to show up for yourself,
you need to show up for your family,
you need to show up for your community.
People are paying attention.
And if you think you can just play around
in this game called entrepreneurship
and not attack it with a real, motivated
sense of success and accomplishment,
you're just gonna miss out on opportunity.
So here are the three things I wanna share with you
to really help you crystallise these beliefs.
Number one is the drug addict obsession, okay?
I share this story because it's just such a powerful
and potent example
of what's possible when you're motivated, okay?
I grew up in a really challenging environment.
A lot of you guys may not know my story,
but, you know, drug addict, rehab, jail twice
all as a teenager.
You can search the power of belief on my YouTube channel.
You'll see the videos of me telling this story.
But what I learned at a young age
that really helped me and inspired me as an entrepreneur
was seeing these drug addicts, these alcoholics, okay?
Me being one of them,
wake up in the morning with zero money, zero opportunities,
zero resources, okay?
In the morning, and getting to a place
that by 3, 4, 5 PM at night, they were drunk or high.
Why?
How are they able to do this?
What did they know?
And what I've realised is that a lot of people say,
"Well, I need this money from this investor.
I need this customer.
I need this team member."
And those things may be true,
but the truth is what you need more than anything
is you gotta be obsessed.
You gotta be obsessed at the same level.
If you think of like drug addict being, you know,
trying to get higher drunk at 10,
some of you guys are showing up at a 1.5
and you're expecting results, okay?
You need to like really bring it, okay
So that's the first thing.
The second thing is essentially non-motivated actions, okay?
So to me, it's not what you do
when you're motivated that counts,
it's how you show up when the motivation is gone, right?
It's the habits.
And to me, the habits take over when the motivation is gone.
So a lot of people they're like, "I don't feel motivated
so I'm not gonna do the work.
I don't feel motivated so I'm not gonna take that meeting.
I don't feel motivated," this, that.
And it's like, wow!
That's not the thing that's gonna make it work.
You literally need to show up when you're not motivated.
You need to create that muscle.
You gotta create that habit.
The last thing I wanna leave you with on
is a metaphor and really a story
that I shared once with my brother
to kind of crystallise the idea
that motivation trumps knowledge.
And that's that, you know,
I remember sitting down with my youngest brother
and we were talking about finding new customers.
And the way he was sharing his desire
I really felt like it was more interested, not committed.
He was interested in an outcome,
but he wasn't committed to the outcome, right?
Like a pig is committed, a chicken is interested, right?
A chicken doesn't have to, you know, like,
it's a bad metaphor, but you guys get the idea.
There's a difference between interested and committed.
So I start to tell him this story.
And the story goes like this,
is I first asked him, I said,
what's the probability of you achieving this goal right now?
Based on what you shared with me, 90 days,
if you set a 90-day goal,
what's the probability of achieving this goal?
And he's like, "I don't know, like 30 or 40%."
And I'm like, cool.
Now picture this.
Picture a world where the person you love the most,
at the time he said his girlfriend,
you knew that 90 days if you didn't achieve this goal
that her life would be taken, right?
And it's an extreme example,
but it's worth considering to understand what would change.
And I said, if you truly believed in your soul
that not achieving that outcome
would have that kind of dire downside or outcome,
what's your probability now
that you could achieve that goal?
And he said 110%.
Interesting.
What changed?
Right there, you went from 30% to a 110%.
What changed?
And he said, "I would just do whatever it would take."
Perfect!
That's what I'm trying to say.
A lot of you think it's knowledge.
A lot of you it's, "I need to read this book.
I gotta buy this course.
I gotta watch this YouTube.
I gotta listen to this podcast.
I gotta go and meet these people."
And what I'm telling you is that for 90% of you out there,
this is a motivation obsession game.
This is a, "I'm deciding no matter what
I'm gonna make this work."
This is a, "I will do whatever it takes to,"
kind of mindset.
And if you show up and you play reserved
and be interested and not committed,
you're absolutely not gonna win the game.
You're gonna have your competitors out there.
You're gonna wonder your whole life,
"Why did everybody else succeed?
Why are all these people crushing it?
What did they figure out that I didn't figure out?"
And I'll tell you, this is the topic.
This is what you need to come back to.
So that's what I wanna share with you.
I really hope that the ideas
of motivation trumps knowledge
inspires you to really double click
on how you're showing up right now.
What level out of 10 of obsession, you know,
'cause your obsessions becomes your possessions, okay?
What level are you showing up and is that gonna support you?
So I want you to leave a comment below.
Let me know what you got this
and I hope this video finds you incredibly well.
Talk soon. Peace!
Later.
(upbeat music)