- The founder's operating system.
Today I'm super excited to share with you guys
kind of this philosophy I have
on how great founders operate.
I remember a few months ago I was talking with a founder
and they were having some struggles and challenges
raising their round of funding,
so we met at my house and we were talking through
the strategy, and it got really clear to me quickly
that the challenge was actually not the mechanics
or the process, cause I'd showed them that.
I showed them how the premarketing phase works,
and the fundraising, the close, all those things
were being executed on, but the challenge
was their approach to it or their mindset.
The conversations, the language they were using
was not confident.
I don't know if you've ever talked to a friend
that is just down, even though they're saying the right
things, you just don't feel it.
That's what I was hearing, and it reminded me
about this analogy I like to use
where a lot of people try to understand the applications
in life, they want to understand lean start up,
agile development, fundraising processes,
Facebook marketing.
Those are all applications, but those applications
actually run on the operating system of the mind.
I'm obviously a computer geek,
so that analogy made a lot of sense.
You've got all these different things you can learn
how to do, the skills, the tactics, but those at some point
have to run on the operating system,
and if that's not great, they don't run.
Those strategies or those tactics don't work.
I don't know how many people learn about Facebook marketing,
but are they still doing it?
Do they even get going?
Do they start to see some results and not pursue it?
That's because the operating system isn't working.
So what I want to teach you guys today is three ways
that I think about improving your mindset,
or what I call the founder's operating system.
The number one is the people.
When you think about life, you're gonna be so influenced
by the amount of people you spend the most time with.
There's a quote that says,
you're the average of the five people
you spend the most time with.
They couldn't be more true, because
essentially every idea comes from conversations.
Every moment where you feel pushed or challenged
comes from somebody else, either you saw do really well,
or they asked you questions that made you kind of
reassess where you were going.
And those conversations and those people matter so much.
To be around them you can organize founders' dinners,
and I did a video on this, you can go to events,
you can build your personal advisory board,
or what I call the Dream 100, and really just be conscious
that to build that founder operating system,
you need to have the right people in your life
to push you towards that direction.
The second thing that I do that I've been doing now
for 15 years is I read books.
A lot of people say, well I read a lot, I read blogs,
I read magazines, I subscribe to fast company,
all these things.
Look, those things, when it comes to ideas and knowledge,
I consider those fast food.
Those are not deep, healthy, elaborate perspectives
on a strategy or an idea.
I recommend books, and I do two types of books.
I do books on things like leadership, branding,
marketing, positioning, and then other ones
on just biographies, because it kind of gives me
that first one, the people part, where I'm reading about
somebody else's journey and I can resonate with that,
and it motivates me or excites me, or it kind of
just opens up the breadth of thinking that I can have
around a problem.
Or it's just cool to understand how history has evolved
and how entrepreneurship has evolved as a profession.
So books is a huge part of that,
not magazines or blogs, real books.
Every day at minimum I spend at least 30 minutes
while I'm eating breakfast, but more than that,
usually one to two hours a day, because
to me it's like compound interest.
The more I learn today, the bigger the return
is gonna be over time.
The third one is modeling.
A lot of people talk about this idea of best practices,
but for me, modeling is identifying three or four,
maybe up to five people that you feel, for what
you're trying to accomplish, they've really exhibited
or accomplished that in a way that you admire.
And that word admire is really important.
If it's business, if it's family, whatever it is,
you find those people and you try to model them.
Now you may not have access to them,
you may not have their cell numbers, maybe you can't
talk to them, but you can at least pay attention
to how they communicate, how they work.
Maybe there's been books written on them, maybe articles.
Read those articles, and really try to model the behaviors,
that you think, those best practices, those success
behaviors to really get you the most.
And I do this for every major initiative in my company
no matter what I'm trying to do,
I try to find the world's best people.
I always do world class.
That world world class is very important to me.
It shapes my operating system of thinking.
And find those people that are doing things at that level
and even if I don't understand it, just copy it,
just borrow, be inspired,
because by doing it and having faith in the process,
even if you don't completely understand it at first,
you'll at least get going, you'll get that feedback,
and you'll start that process of modeling.
So those are the three areas.
To make sure that you really have the right people,
you read a lot of books, and you model success behaviors.
That is how you start to reshape the operating system
so that those applications can execute and work flawlessly.
I hope you found this video useful,
and I invite you to like and leave a comment below.
Let me know if you have some other ideas for how you can
improve your founder operating system.
I also want to challenge you guys to live a bigger life
and a bigger business, and I'll see you guys next Monday.