- In order to change your life,
you need to know this one thing, and that is,
in life the only thing that's constant is change.
Remember Blockbuster?
That's correct, now if you're old enough,
you would know that Blockbuster used to be
a huge chain where they rent out video games,
and yes, DVD movies.
Do you know that at one point Blockbuster
actually has an opportunity to acquire Netflix
for $50 million dollars.
Only $50 million dollars,
but because the CEO lacked the vision
and he lacked the ability to change, what happened?
They didn't take action.
And Blockbuster in 2010 went bankrupt,
when it lost over $1.1 billion dollars.
And where is Netflix today?
Netflix is now worth a market cap
of over $150 billion dollars.
You and I know, we even talk about it
Netflix and chill, it becomes a term,
it becomes a verb, it becomes a household brand.
And of course, the founder, CEO of Netflix
is now a billionaire.
You see in order for things to change first, what?
You have to change.
In order for anything to change first
you must make that change.
I remember when I was working for my first mentor, Allen,
when I was in my early 20s,
at a time Allen has a very successful company,
and he was marketing the business using broadcast fax.
Now for the millennials, you're like, what the hell is fax?
Yes, good old fax machine.
At that time you would use broadcast fax,
kinda like think about email,
but you're able to send a lot of these faxes out there
to market your products and services.
And it was extremely profitable because it's cheap as hell.
And we were making a ton of money.
Then suddenly, one day the government saying,
know what, you can not do broadcast fax no more.
You can not spam people with faxes no more.
Okay, that immediately kill that revenue stream.
And then we found out, you know what,
maybe we can do outbound telemarketing.
So we were doing a lot of cold calling to bring in business
and then that was working, at one point working very well,
and then guess what?
The government saying you can not now do that.
They have now what we call a do not call list.
These people you can not call anymore.
Okay that also affected us, that is change.
You see one of the most powerful questions
you can ask yourself is, what can go wrong next.
What can go wrong next?
What can I capitalize on next?
One of the favorite questions that I like to ask is
what will happen if blank.
What would happen if blank?
Ask yourself what would happen if you lose your job.
What would happen if your investment tanks?
As an entrepreneur, ask yourself,
What will happen if you lose
your most important client or account?
What will happen if you lose your most important employee?
What would happen if your vendor
goes out of business without warning?
What would happen if your local economy changes?
What would happen
if you then cannot market the same way
that you're marketing right now?
What would happen if one of the platforms
that using no longer works?
What would happen if when you ask yourself those questions,
not being overly optimistic,
is one of the things I believe is,
when times are good,
you don't want to be overly optimistic.
You don't want to be over confident.
When times are bad you don't want to be overly pessimistic.
That's okay because tough times don't last,
but tough people do.
As Confucius said, real knowledge
is to know the extent of ones' ignorance.