So growing up i felt really insecure about being poor, where my mom and i didn't look like anyone else and we had very, very little, and you can imagine that as a kid this was really tough on me, because when you're in second grade all you want to do is just fit in.
But what i didn't realize was that all of these insecurities would actually set me up for success, where i'd actually argue that all of my achievements, ranging from landing a job at goldman to starting my own company, all actually came out of the moment where i realized that I can actually turn my insecurities into my strengths.
And so in this video, I'm going to walk you through all three realizations that I had, in hopes that by the end of this video, you'll have taken whatever insecurity or difference that you feel like you have and actually realize that it's one of your strengths.
So the first leg up you have on the competition actually stems from the fact that you start a leg down.
Where often in society I think, we tell ourselves these narratives around oh, if I don't have this privilege or that privilege, I'm just not going to make it.
And I find these narratives to be kind of toxic because they take away our own agency and our own power and actually going for and achieving our dreams.
Because I actually think there's a gift in starting with a lack of privilege, where that lack of privilege actually forces us to become even better if we just want to survive or compete.
And this is something I call forced foundational mastery.
Now, what do I mean by this huge buzzword that I just made up because I couldn't figure out a better way to describe it?
And I think the best way to actually describe this to you is actually through the lens of me telling you the story of how I managed to cold call my way into a job at Goldman Sachs with zero connections.
So Goldman is the very best investment bank.
And if you know anything about breaking into a job on Wall Street, you know that it's entirely about networking.
Where basically, if you even want to land a first round interview, you first have to have someone at that bank actually vouch for you.
AKA, you need some sort of pre-built relationship.
But, as you can imagine, as someone who grew up pretty poor, I knew absolutely no one in investment banking.
Like my family had no connections.
My mom didn't even know what investment banking was.
And so I was sitting there heading into recruiting, being like how am I ever even going to land a shot at getting one of these offers?
And to make matters even more difficult for me, a lot of the kids that I was competing with all had a dad who was either an investment banker themselves or was fraternity of others with some managing director at one of the top banks.
All to say, they had a shoe in.
And so when I first started this recruiting process, I felt really frustrated.
I mean, I felt cheated and upset that, even if I had a better resume, just because I didn't know someone I couldn't get an interview.
But at the end of the day, I knew that this was my dream job and I was not going to let circumstances affect my own personal success.
And so for the next few months I hustled so freaking hard where I sent hundreds of cold emails where I would basically go through LinkedIn and find any alum from my school that I could find possibly and just beg them for an informational interview.
And through that painful process of getting ghosted, constantly getting rejected, but then eventually having a couple conversations, I was able to learn the small ticks and differences between how to send a cold email that someone deletes immediately and ghosts you on and how to send a cold email where someone opens it up and says, holy crap, like this kid has done their research.
I really want to talk to them.
And, at the same time, because I knew that in an interview I wasn't going to be able to connect with the interviewer about my favorite country club or where I summer.
I instead had to do so many mock interviews and prep so hard and learn the fundamentals of how to leave an interview with the interviewer absolutely loving you.
And, of course, through sheer persistence and a ton of reps, I ultimately landed an offer at my dream job.
But the Lessinger isn't actually about the fact that I worked super hard and I went for it.
That's kind of part of the process. it's actually the thing that happened next that I didn't expect.
Basically, if you think about my peers who had that shoo-in introduction into their first job, they never had the chance to learn the fundamentals of how do you write a really good cold email or how do you build a really genuine cold relationship with someone.
Whereas for me, because I didn't have anyone to show me the way or the privilege of starting at a higher step, I had to learn all the fundamentals from zero to a thousand.
Where now, from my much older and wiser vantage point, I can tell you with absolute conviction that the skills I was forced to develop in that initial recruiting process have served me incredibly well in terms of actually starting my own company and raising 5 million to my startup.
And so what I want you to realize is that yes, Sometimes someone will get a shortcut early on, but that kind of shortcut doesn't matter to someone who's mastering the fundamentals and thinking about playing the long game.
And the thing is you actually have another trait in your bag as someone coming from a disadvantage of actually making sure that you're playing the long game.
And that trait is just the sheer hustle and hunger that comes from having a chip on your shoulder.
So I'm super open to admitting that I had a chip on my shoulder growing up because, number one, I was bullied a ton for looking the way that I looked.
And then number two, because I just felt so insecure about everything that I didn't have growing up, whether that was the Xbox at my friend's house or the fact that I had to do SAT prep for my Asian mom while my other friends got to have fun.
But now looking back, I'm actually really grateful for it.
And I'll tell you a story as to why.
So after I left my job in investment banking, I entered the promised lands of private equity.
And I was so so, so hungry to make a name for myself in private equity that I wanted to do something that very few junior associates do, which is sourcing a new deal.
And basically what sourcing a deal means is that you, as an associate, find some hidden gem of a business out there that your firm ends up deploying millions of dollars of investment into.
But if you think about it, this is actually insanely hard to do as someone in your early 20s.
Number one, you're competing with all the other top private equity firms out there.
And then number two, the companies that are the best companies out there, aka the ones you actually want to invest in are so profitable that they don't actively want your investment.
But I had such a chip on my shoulder and I was so hungry to just make it that every day I'd get in by 7am and I would just rip the phones off the wall and cold call every possible CEO and top entrepreneur I could find.
And I would do this every single day and leave so many voicemails and get rejected so many times.
But I was just so hungry for sourcing a deal and making it and proving to myself that I could actually be successful, that I just persisted.
And now, when I look back, maybe one of the saddest parts about that experience and just speaks towards how much of a chip that I actually had on my shoulder was that I used to really love and look forward to three-day weekends because I knew that I was the only one working on that three-day weekend and I was out working the competition.
I was just that hungry, and in no way am I saying that that was healthy whatsoever.
In fact, that's a completely different discussion.
But because of that hustle and sheer persistence I had that chip on the shoulder I was ultimately able to source the largest proprietary source deal that we had ever done in the firm's history, which is a 90 million investment.
So the moral of this story here is that if you come from nothing, or if you know what hunger feels like, where you don't even know where your next meal is coming from, you have absolutely nothing to lose.
And that hustle is going to lead you to outwork all the competition but, more importantly, become a better version of yourself every single day.
And what you're gonna see is that little amount of extra hard work you put in every single day.
That 1 difference is going to compound over the long run and help you build the dream life you actually want.
Basically, I want you to realize that you are built different.
But the caveat I'll give you here is that these two qualities that we just talked about so building out your fundamentals and sheer persistence are, in my opinion, only enough to get you to a medium amount of success in life, where I actually think you need this third and final trait in order to unlock the greatest amount of success in your life, not only in your career but, in my opinion, more importantly, in living a happy and fulfilling life.
And that trait is one that I'm still working on myself, which is empathy.
So the thing about growing up in a tough environment or with less resources than the most is that it gives you a really deep empathy for other people who are struggling in some other way.
And one of the things I've learned the most in life is that the more you understand how other people feel and you can empathize with their problems, the more successful you'll actually be.
And so right now you might be saying oh, this empathy thing, it sounds super fluffy and woo woo and all this kindness stuff.
But I'm actually going to break down for you rationally why being empathetic will help you unlock the best version of yourself.
And so I want to break this down for you through the lens of my company that I've scaled from zero to almost 10 million in recurring revenue over the last two years.
So when I first started my company, we had over 500 competitors in this link in bio space.
So everyone kept asking me, John, why are you doing this?
There's all these competitors and legacy incumbents who've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and you're just gonna start another competitive solution.
But I knew that I had one distinct advantage over all of my other competitors, and that was that I was my own customer.
See, the reason I started Stan was actually to solve my own pain points and my own problems as a content creator.
And so I built Stan with the original form of empathy which was, I felt the pain all the time as my own customer.
Whereas all of my competitors were just a bunch of tech bros who sat in Silicon Valley and had no idea what it was like to truly be a content creator.
And so, because I can so deeply empathize with our customer, I don't have to guess which product features to build or how to market and what language to use in my marketing, because I can deeply empathize with my customer and really put myself in their shoes and be like huh like, what would I want if I was a creator, or how would I want to be marketed to that I would actually purchase this product.
And so you start to see that the most successful people in business are the people who understand their customers' problems and pain points the most viscerally, aka they can truly empathize the most with their customer.
And so, when I reflect on why my company, in such a short amount of time, has grown so quickly and scaled so successfully, I really think it's because we've rooted ourselves so deeply in one of our core values, which is empathy.
And that's because, growing up the way that I did, I know how it feels to stress about am I gonna be able to pay the bills this month?
Or how am I gonna put food on the table?
Which all draws back to our company's mission, which is just to empower anyone to make money working for themselves.
And so what you see here is these soft, nebulous values around empathy and just caring about other people leads to a mission for a company, which then trickles down into just building the best product and service in this case, software possible for the market.
And so, with all that being said, I wanted to make this video to show you that all the insecurities or disadvantages or differences that we grew up with thinking oh no, I wish I didn't have these, we can actually reframe them into becoming our strengths.
And so I will leave you with this quote from Tyrion Lannister, which is to wear your insecurities like armor, because then they can never be used to hurt you.
