- Good morning Believe nation.
Today's message is hustle.
Over to you, Timothy Sykes.
(rooster crowing)
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Entspresso keep me going
♫ I wake up every morning
- The key to being successful is to work harder
than other people, 'cause everybody wants success.
Everybody wants a Lamborghini.
Everybody wants freedom, but what are you willing to do
to get there?
That's my question to you.
We're here at the most prestigious university
in America, Harvard.
Fantastic, I'm very honored.
Thank you for having me here.
The people who have gotten here have worked their butts off
to get here, but that's just the beginning.
Whether you're in college or you're going to go to college,
or you're out of college, this is a lifelong journey
where you have to continually work hard,
work harder than other people to get ahead.
A lot of people give up at different times.
I'm no longer at that stage.
When I had my big loss, I basically gave up.
For a year I was in the gutter, but I came back.
And I said, "You know what?
"This was a mistake that I made investing.
"It wasn't the patterns.
"I didn't go against what I learned to make
"all my millions before this loss.
"I invested," and I didn't do my full due diligence,
and that was my mistake.
I eventually got back into trading.
I saw more patterns, and I became the number one
lane trader at a 50,000 on Covestor in 2007 to 2011.
- Every time I think about this message,
I think about Jerry Seinfeld, and one of my favorite
bits of advice from Jerry Seinfeld is you need to find
the thing that most people consider torture.
It's the torture that you can endure,
where, when people look at your schedule,
they would see it as torturous.
Look at what I do.
Look what I do on Youtube.
So many people write in, they Tweet me, they email me
asking, "How do you do so many videos?
"I'm having a hard time doing one video a week".
It's torture.
If you were to look up my schedule, it would be torture.
Making three videos at least a day,
going to the Youtube channel on top of responding to
all the comments that come in.
We get hundreds of comments every day that we respond to,
on top of keeping track of all the requests, right,
from the top 10 series we have over 2,500 requests,
and we keep track of it.
We keep note and see how many people voted
for different people, and then we start making those videos,
on top of coming up with new series ideas
for what we can test out.
It'd be so easy just to keep with the same formula,
but it's not enough.
It's got to get better.
We got to grow.
We got to improve.
It's torture.
You would look at our schedule and say,
"There's no way I want to do that much work,"
but it's why I've gotten better.
It's why I went from the worst summit agency to the best,
because, while everybody else was having trouble
doing one video a week, I was doing multiple videos a day.
It's that hustle, and it's not to say that I'm great.
Anybody can accomplish it.
You just have to find the thing that you can do
that would look like torture to other people,
so, as an example, I had Neil Pasricha on my channel.
We did his top 10 together, and afterwards
we were talking about his book.
He has a book.
It sold over a million copies, and he was giving me advice
on how to sell a book, and one of the bits of advice
that he gave me was he would go to all the book stores
around in the general area, and in Toronto we've got
a lot of different book stores, and find out if they had
at least one copy of the book in store,
and he would drive there, and he would talk to the manager,
and he would sign the book, and he would have stickers
that said signed by author, and he would chat up the manager
and talk about why he made this book, and they would,
because of that conversation, profile a little bit more
at the store, and, when people came in and asked them
for a book, they would give that recommendation,
and so that's how he would spend his days,
driving to different book stores, chatting up
the different managers, signing the books,
putting the stickers on, and I look at that work.
I think that is torture. (laughs)
I couldn't do it.
I would hate to do that, to drive two hours to go
to a book store that had two copies of my book,
to sign those books, and chat up the manager
to get him or her to know me, so they'll recommend the book
and put it higher up, and do that day in, day out.
I couldn't do it.
It's torture,
but that's what he did, that's what he does,
and that's how he's grown and created a business
around his book and his speaking now,
and he's gone all in on that, and it's amazing.
You need to find the same thing for you.
You need to find the thing you can dedicate so much time to,
that you can hustle so hard at that's it's, one, enjoyable.
As much as it may seem torturous for you
to jump into my Youtube schedule, I like it.
I enjoy the work I'm doing.
I look forward to video day.
I look forward to looking at the comments.
I look forward to seeing what new topics
we can come up with.
I like it, and that's how we get better,
so what is the thing that you can do constantly
and still get fueled by and improve and get better
and create more value that other people would look at
and say, "That is torture"?
That's the question of the day.
Question of the day: what is a thing that you do,
that you hustle so hard at, that nobody's going to touch you
'cause it's torture for everybody else?
Leave it in the comments below.
Then we'll join in discussion.
I also want to give a quick shoutout to Ken Ritchie.
Ken, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book,
Your One Word.
It really, really, really means a lot to me,
and I hope you're enjoying reading it.
Thank you guys again for watching.
I believe in you.
I hope you continue to believe in yourself
and whatever your one word is,
and I'll see you again tomorrow morning
for another shot of Entspresso.
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Entspresso keep me going
Hey, Believe nation, for those of you who want
a little extra motivation on hustling,
I've included some bonus clips that I hope you'll enjoy.
- People can look at me, and it almost pisses them off.
They'll tell us, "That guy gets results?
"I'm pissed," right, and kind of piss them off,
and then they got to deny it to themselves and stuff.
Yeah, they can even see videos.
They'll go and say, "That's a actress. It can't be.
"He's uglier than me and he's got a girl?
"Actress," right?
No, dude.
You just didn't go out.
I did, you didn't.
I've actually thought sometimes of creating a video called
What I Did While You Didn't Do It or
What I Was Doing While You Were, no, no.
I was thinking of calling it What I Was Doing
While You Were Doing What You Were Doing,
and I was going to enact the whole thing,
so I'd show what you were doing: watching TV.
Like this, what I was doing: me just hustling through
my life, going through my boring, little, menial, repetitive
tasks that I do every (audio cuts out) day
that improve me 0.000001%
and that add up over time.
I really think I should make a video of myself
just going through my day and just show me doing it
every (audio cuts out) day so people can see
the menial, slow, boring nature of progress,
because, for every public victory you have,
you have a private victory.
For every kick (audio cuts out) video I put up online,
there's those hundreds of hours that I spent at home
looking at my video footage, looking at other speakers,
comparing it, contrasting it, and learning how
to be a better speaker.
For every hot seat video you see of me where I do some epic
(audio cuts out) that blows your mind, there's all that time
that I spent going out doing menial, little
bull (audio cuts out) approaches again and again and again
and then going home and looking at what I did
and how I could improve it, and on and on.
For every kick (audio cuts out) freaking out boot camp
student that I have that loved the program,
there's those (audio cuts out) 50 weekends a year
that I went out and taught, learned every little nuance
of the (audio cuts out) thing again and again and again
for a decade.
That's kind of like what success is like,
I hope that I provide an example of a guy who is
untalented, funny-looking, and shouldn't be able to do it,
and is stunting on all your (audio cuts out) faces,
(audience laughs)
and that you can see that and say, "Oh, shit,
"if that little (audio cuts out) can do it, I can do it".
- [Interviewer] How early in life
did your relentless ambition begin?
Did this happen when you were very young?
You alluded to the fact that you sold papers
at age six or something.
- I don't know.
I don't really feel like I'm that ambitious.
- [Interviewer] Come on, I'd hate to follow you
around for a week.
I'd be in a tomb somewhere.
- Yeah, well, I just work hard, but I know a lot of people
that work hard.
My father worked hard and set an example for me,
and I know a lot of people that work hard.
- [Interviewer] What does that mean, working hard?
What is your day like?
- Work hard is hustle all day long.
Talk about hustlers, Pete Rose on the baseball field,
I try and do that all day long,
and that's what I think we need to do here in America.
The people working in the American automobile industry,
we got to out-hustle the Japanese.
We got to get that old roll up our sleeves
and get back to work.
Then we'll get this country out of trouble.
We can do anything better than anybody else
in the world, I think.
- [Interviewer] You bet your life, there's no person--
- But we got to reawake that spirit.
That's what I'm trying to do with the Atlanta Braves
is get everybody hustling, 'cause it sets a good example
for the people that are watching the program.
- [Interviewer] You want another--
- Fear is the disease.
Hustle is the antidote, so, in my day,
I already sound like an old school dude.
In my day it was just tough, man.
You start a company in 2001, good luck, right?
You can't count on funding.
You can't count on sales.
You can't count on anything but just crazy hustle
and just grit your teeth, claw your way to success.
There was just no easy way to do it.
What I find is a lot of the entrepreneurs today
are much smarter than we were back in the day.
They're like way smarter.
They got blogs.
They know what VCs are doing.
They know everything that's going on in the space.
There's a corpus of knowledge now that makes entrepreneurs
today much smarter, but there's liquidity in funding,
especially on the angel side.
It used to be much harder to get an angel deal done
than a series A deal.
Now, angel deals are a piece of cake, but what happens is
I see a number of entrepreneurs who don't have that hustle,
and they're afraid, and they act out of that fear,
and, when you act out of that fear, you make big mistakes.
An example might be doing a preempted deal with a VC
thinking they're your friend.
An example might be not being hardcore in keeping your job.
An example might be, a lot of times it gets
exposed through deals.
You see that fear being exposed through the deal cycle,
and, if you're an entrepreneur and you find yourself
afraid of something, sack up, okay,
and start hustling.
Hustling is the antidote to fear.
Go create your success.