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 looked 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 or 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 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?
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 gonna come from 10 % of the stuff you do, you've got to find that 10 % as quickly as possible.
And that's what we help startups do.
Huh, 90 % of your growth.
So this is like the 80 -20 principle, just like even more extreme than that.
What other examples have you seen of this 90 -10 principle in action when it comes to growing businesses?
I mean, 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 those are a couple examples, but again, if you study HubSpot or any of these great startups, you'll find things like this.
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 three 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?
So there's a few questions in there, 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.
A startup is a company that grows fast, that's built to grow fast.
And to do growth effectively, first of all, you need to really understand the business every aspect from 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.
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 gonna 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 gonna 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 go to the business?
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 gotta 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 gonna wanna 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 gonna 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 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 US 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 into the US.
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. That's super interesting.
All right, I'm sold.
So then what does growth leavers mean?
And why is that the type of book?
And it's an American book.
So they're leavers.
Just for the record.
Leavers. Yeah. Now it sounds so much better when you say it anyways.
Leavers. Leavers. So these leavers are or leavers 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 leavers?
Leavers and process and not leavers and process.
Anyway, there's four steps to this process.
The first thing, which I think we're gonna 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.
And once you've got some data in there, you can sort of mathematically derive where are the points of highest leverage.
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.
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 what questions would they have?
And how can you sort of turn up there and look like that thing?
So we started the customer journey.
Actually I have a really cool example of that.
So on the way here, I was walking in, like the next muse over, I went and looked at the same house number and I figured out it wasn't your house, but the doorbell had a sticker on it.
It said 24 -hour emergency locksmith.
And I took a picture of it.
And I figured out this locksmith could advertise anywhere in London, but the place I'm gonna be when I suddenly realized I need a locksmith is right here locked out of my flat.
And so I was like, okay, that's a perfect example of growth hacking because you figured out what are you gonna be looking for and where are you gonna be when you suddenly realize you need it and just turn up there and look like that thing.
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 as locksmith sponsored it yesterday, you're not gonna 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 gonna have lots of ideas.
And so you're gonna wanna 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 gonna have more ideas and most of them are gonna be bad.
So the next thing you gotta 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 gonna have are hard.
I'm gonna publish a book.
That takes a long time.
I'm gonna do this or that, whatever.
It takes a lot of money, gonna build some product.
All those things are hard.
And you've gotta 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 gonna publish a book, and suppose maybe you just really wanted to write a book, but maybe you're hoping the book's gonna be a creative to your business.
Yeah, so 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?
That Ali can write a book reasonably quickly, that it won't distract him from running his business, that people will actually wanna buy the book, people will like the book, and that 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 lotta risky assumptions 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, 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?
So 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 the two categories of 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.
Yep. 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 or an engineer or 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 gonna 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.
From the experience, yeah.
But I think it's something we've been quite bad at in that we've often done things and then only like two years later we'll remember, oh yeah, we did that thing and we, yeah, we really should have written down what we learned from that because we've just made that mistake again.
Actually, that was part of the experiment process is document your experiments we've done 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 gonna get a bad grade or a fire to something isn't gonna talk about them.
And then you're not gonna learn from them.
And then someone else is gonna 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 gonna ship on December 10th.
We have 21 days before the end of the fiscal year to make our money.
We'll make 100 million in iPhone sales per day.
If we ship a day late, we miss our earnings number by 100 million.
It has to be perfect and they do it every time.
And when Steve Jobs was alive, almost every product they launch was successful, which is the complete opposite of every other company.
And I always remember, how did 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 gonna 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 gonna 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.
And 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 gonna keep asking you to peel things back, consolidate and simplify.
In fact, 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 it is life changing is kind of a discreet 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, and 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, you know, I don't wanna get into all the weeds of well, you know, what behavior on Twitter indicates they're a true fan versus just, but you know you've got over five million followers, but every video you put up doesn't get five 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 dedup across platforms.
But you can sort of what across platforms?
You can sort of use estimates to dedup across platforms.
So someone who's deduplicate.
Oh, okay, right, yeah, cool.
Because some people are gonna like your podcast and your channel, and some people are gonna 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 gonna 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 a 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 gonna wanna 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 gonna have something like monthly active listeners, or consumers of content.
We do have a metric in YouTube, 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, because if that number were to grow 10x, we would be getting millions of views in each video.
So what do we call that?
Sorry, 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 just turning.
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 Ali sold out.
That he's like, ah, 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 gonna unfollow you?
Or are they gonna be a true fan and see what your next video is and watch it if it's what they like?
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 gonna click on that video.
The people who are like, you know what, I just want a 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.
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, five million views from other people outside of that core audience.
Okay. So there's a piece of this model we're gonna have to think about, which is how do you get loyal subscribers?
How do you get followers?
And then there's gonna be this other piece, which is how do you engage them and retain them?
And then there's gonna be this other piece, which is how do you monetize them?
Yeah, nice. I mean, I think it's that simple, right?
It'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 gonna do to our view target kind of thing?
So remember, these are gonna be returning visitors.
So the goal is to deliver a drum beat of content that they find valuable rather than one specific hit.
Yeah, good point. I'm guessing, because I see this with my LinkedIn posts, that I just have bangers that generate the lion's share of my impressions and lion's share of my audience.
And I have other ones that mostly just my loyal readers engage with.
And 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 gonna make.
Yeah, and also if I think of monthly returning viewers as like one question we've been thinking about to get really inside baseball here, it's 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 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 lifestyle -y 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 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'd be nice for the monthly returning viewers metric, to be honest, to be able to put the vlogs there.
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 on the main channel instead of the second channel and see what happens.
Okay. 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.
I think it's a little ambitious to think we're gonna be able to tightly define the North Star as these metrics from this system, you know, averaged over 90 days or whatever.
I think we can agree on the principle that it's gonna be some measurement of who are people who remember you and know you and like you and royally consume your content, presumably because they find it helpful.
Yeah. Just a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get back to the show.
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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.
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 wanna have to do.
It's like, okay, but then what do you wanna do?
It's like, it becomes quite confronting in a way.
Oh, what was your experience with that?
Well, Ed, 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, 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.
And what I realized, 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 that was the first time when I was like, okay, I should try to actually work on something long -term, right?
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 for our 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 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, 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 gonna 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 go do that thing.
Nice. Yeah, that's great.
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.
I've never read the book, but like, what should I understand or what your 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 there's a way to succeed or fail.
There's an end to it, all of these things, right?
Like a football game is itself a finite game because there'll be a winner or a 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, slipping crypto confidential into everything that I talk about until, yeah, exactly.
Like buy the book, right?
Like, if you buy by the end of this podcast, you're gonna 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 find a partner or to have a successful date is to not be trying to make it a successful date, right?
Is 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 gonna 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 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 gonna set me up for many, many great books in the future and over a long term that's gonna compound it to 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 gonna be handled, I do think has like a totally different 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 having a thoughtful plan, whether you do what's in Tim Ferriss's book for our work week, Tony Robbins is a book of just creating just 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 that's like practically, I don't think enough people talk about that needs to get done as a sort of a first baseline step.
Like if you're at the point where you were worried about paying your bills, then obviously getting more money is gonna make you way happier because now you've removed all that stress from your life.
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 after, 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.
As long as you're sort of thoughtfully investing, that's a secure 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 100 ,000 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 starts to impact you or 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 demand that particular number, but that number gives them some sort of 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 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'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 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 won the lottery because it was like, yeah, like maybe the numbers are bigger than I thought that they were gonna 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 wasn't this surprise.
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, 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 were like, they had lost their purpose.
And they were like, well, I thought the money was important and they de -risk their lives, bought a house, whatever it is, but now I lost the thing that I was doing.
And now I'm just gonna 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 pretty intense for those three or four.
And so I think that wealth isn't a replacement for purpose.
It's 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, oh, that 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 wall -adjusted he was at 23.
I never would have thought this was 23.
So he is actually at Harvard Business School while he writes this plan.
He got in on an engineering scholarship.
I was going to say, he's at HBS at 23 as well.
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 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 defend people who, and is one of the most sort of purpose -driven and happy people in his life.
And now he's running for president.
No. But how did he pull it off?
Because I've thought, how does he pull this off?
Because I'm here, we're in this amazing place.
And like, two rows down there are houses that are three times as much that I can be pulled to want more.
And so I try to remember this guy because the purpose part of his life has guided him.
I think the way he's stayed on track, to me, is for two reasons.
And you're an Atomic Habits fan, so I think it's in there.
So number one, he defined his identity in life later as living consistent with his purpose of having a second career and helping people.
Number two, he knew that his environment would matter.
He moved out of the town he lived in, in St.
Louis, after he had this exit, he moved to Wyoming, where the currency of his community was gonna be health, being active, and not the rat race of the business community he was in about what are you doing next, 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 yeah, that story, I think, has a lot of lessons that 20 years before James Clear was putting this out and how it applies to money, he lived.
Just makes me feel broken.
But I think that what's really interesting about that, you and I were talking about this is like, you and I have done an incredible amount of introspection over the past couple years.
And 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 makes me spark a question in my head that we're not gonna settle, unfortunately, here, which is can you get to that level of 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 can 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.
The best thing I've gotten to is I like increasing concentric circles of freedom, meaning I am able to do this.
Now I want to try to solve this small -scale problem in my town, and then I want to be able to solve a larger -scale problem.
That type of stuff motivates me, but I still have this energy where it's an anxiety where there has to be something more.
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, I want to meet this person.
I hope you can intro me.
I just want to go and drive up or fly up and be like, just tell me how you got here, that type of a thing.
But one of the things that, I don't think he would put it in these terms, but he would say he hacked his brain back to identity and said, part of who I am is going to be somebody who.
Thinks this way, does the same.
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 and publicly knew.
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 it's something that I've thought about related to some of the things we were talking about for you this weekend is like, if your clearly defined identity and purpose is measured totally on impact or spending your time on teaching or what have you, and it's explicitly not financial beyond a certain point,
and then that's public.
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 that he had in his life, he put that out there which created a little, I think like identity scaffolding 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 their 40 ,000 or 40 ,000 pound salary per year or doing some of this introspection of what's really important, and you and I have talked a lot about this over the past year of how important it is to just think about what do
you want and then work backwards.
And that's what it sounds like this person has done to a level that 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.
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