No, don't go in there, Daddy's working.
Jonathan: You know what time it is. Yes, yes, y'all. Coming back to you straight from the Expedition. Nope, no Lamborghinis, no Ferraris here. Expedition, baby, 13 years old and I love it. I love it. I always dreamt of having a big truck and especially when I was in construction and that was really the time where I couldn’t afford it. I dreamt of having a big truck. I would have been driving back and forth to work and my whole paycheck would’ve gone to gas back then. But that's not the case now. Daddy's Working, baby. Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. [0:01:01.7]
Yes, we're in the car again, the truck - expect some background noise, but that's alright. We're friends. You can overlook that, can't you? Just driving back from the studio. Finished recording Daddy's Working episode, which you would have heard last week with Brandon Neely. Been thinking a lot about mentors and mentorship and how mentorship is a shortcut to growth. I'm going to, I don’t actually share this number openly. There's probably, well three, I was going to say there's two people in the world that know this number, but there's three - there's me, there's Cupcake, and there's our accountant. I don’t say this to brag. I don’t say this to surprise you. The reason I'm going to share this with you is because I want you to understand how important I think this is, not just for your personal growth - for your business growth, for all growth. [0:02:16.1]
You’ve got to get around the right people and you've got to invest. So this year, 2019, I have invested $40,000 . Now, that's not outrageous. It's not crazy. But $40,000 into getting in the right room with the right people who can help me. Look, you can beat your chest. You can pound your chest all you want. If you're one of these guys that says, "Oh, I don’t need a coach. The best coach for me is me." This is like I have a bunch of friends like this. I actually, I respect them because I wish sometimes that I could be like that, I could be so driven. I could just see all the angles myself, but I'm not that bright. [0:03:08.5]
You got to remember, I am D student, nearly a high school dropout. I had to take summer school to graduate. I'm not that motivated, clearly, but if I get around the right people, I am motivated. I do want more. I don’t want to let them down. I want to rise up and pass them. I get competitive. And mostly, I'm competitive with myself. But there's no greater investment than you can make than investing in yourself and getting in the right room with the right people who can help you get further ahead, get you to where you ought to be, or pass where you thought you could be. There's no better investment. That's what I've found in all these years being an entrepreneur. It hasn't been that long. I've only been an entrepreneur since 2004 - 15 years - not very long at all. I'm still trying to figure things out. [0:04:09.4]
But one thing I know for sure, one thing there's no question about, one thing more than any other thing in the world that has helped me get ahead is being around the right people. Having the right mindset. Here's what I want to talk about. I want to… this is hard, okay … this is not something that most of you would want to do, none of us actually want to do this, but it's necessary. You ever hear that analogy where they talk about the crabs in the bucket, where if a bunch of crabs are in a bucket, one of them tries to escape, the others will pull that crab down. If it tries to escape again, they'll put it right back down. And if it tries to escape too many more times, the other crabs will clip its claw. [0:05:03.3]
I don't know, I think I first this story from Ben Settle and I've heard it repeated over and over again. I don't know if there's anything scientific about it but think about that. All these crabs in a bucket. They're about to end up in my crab cakes. We're going to cook them up when we get them into our kitchen. They're all going to certain death. They're going to be in my belly. One of them has the nerve, the gall, to try to get out of there, escape - live another day to do crab things. And all the other ones, all the crab cakes in there, they're pulling that crab back. They're crippling him. They're doing anything they can to make sure that he's in my belly with the rest of them. Certain death. We're surrounded by that. You're surrounded by that. If you're not guarding, protecting your environment, if you're not carefully curating who you're around, you've got these crabs in the form of family, friends, people you work with, acquaintances - they're all crabs and most of them want to keep you down. [0:06:17.1]
That's why I say you've got two kinds of friends in this world. I would say that the crabs, those high school friends that haven't grown up any, those people that just think the world is a bad place and there's nothing you can do about it - those are the chumps. We're surrounded by chumps. You know. I know it. They're everywhere trying to keep you down. If you really want to find out what you're capable of, if you really want to know what you can do, if you want to break out of the matrix and see the reality, you got to get away from those chumps because they're bought into it. They're programmed. They think this is life and everybody's got their station and you can't rise above where you come from. [0:07:08.9]
Listen, chumps - they're wrong. They're going to be miserable forever. God bless them. They're the ones that buy everything, get lots of debt, die and leave nothing behind. Who wants to be one of those guys anways? But you have to eliminate those chumps. That's why I said this is kind of difficult because when you grow up with people or you care about people or you have people close to you, your family, anyone that is in that chump category, which we all do, and you have to cut them out, that's difficult. That's difficult, especially if they're family or very close friends. But I'm here to tell you. This is one of the things that I've had to do and that I've learned has… it's actually a growth tool. Growing by cutting back, cutting back the bad influences in your life, and if you're … look, I'm a little bit of a gardener, little bit of a green thumb - I have had this money tree. It's actually 17 years old now. [0:08:06.5]
I got it when it was 3. I kept it about 13 years and now my dad has had it for a year because I couldn't take it with me to the condo. But I just kind of new at it and I'm all excited about it - but one of the things that we did with these money trees or these … one of the things I'm going to do with both these trees that I did with the one that grew - I grew that thing from about 3 feet, the older one, the 17-year-old one, I grew it from like 3 feet tall when I got it to, at its largest it was about 7-1/2 feet - beautiful, beautiful tree. Now I've got a new little like 18-inch tree that I'm going to start working with and just keep these thing alive and grow it and twist the trunk and make it look beautiful because it's fun. To get that tree to that size, I had to clip it back many times. I had to choose, alright - is this growth good, is this growth bad - I got to cut it. [0:09:00.1]
And with the cutting, the selective pruning, the tree grew bigger and stronger. And so even though it's hard to think about cutting some people out of your life and maybe not hanging out with family that is in the chump category, that's for your growth. You have to do that if you want to grow. There's no question about it.
Now there's other people. We have talked about the chumps, why you got to cut them and how that helps you grow. Now there's other people. There's two kinds of people in this world. I say this all the time. I'm very polarized or black and white. But there's chumps, who we just talked about. Then, there are the champs. Champions. World class. People who make the world what they want it to be. So I told you I was thinking about Brandon and I just interviewed him. In fact, that was the interview from last week, but one of the things that really, really became clear to me when I was talking to him is how you got to get around champions. [0:10:09.0]
There's champions in your life that maybe you don’t even know are champions. Maybe there's champions around you that you haven’t met and are yet to be your champions. But you have to look for these champions who have the things that you want or they're doing the things that you want to do, who are in the place you want to be. And you got to do anything to make contact. Brandon said he pays for mentorship. He does work with other mentors. It's a reciprocal relationship. What was this guy's name from the Go-Getters? Bob Burg. I interviewed Bob Burg once and he talks about giving and receiving being like breathing. You can't just breathe in. You'll die. You can't just exhale. You'll die. So you need to breathe in and you need to breathe out. You need to give and you need to receive. [0:11:04.7]
So giving mentorship, getting mentorship is a reciprocal thing. That's what I want you to know - whether you have to pay for it or find other ways to create value in that relationship. But getting around the champions is going to be a shortcut to success because the same way that those chumps, those crabs in the bucket are putting bad ideas in your head and telling you you can't escape, you're going to be in my belly. The same way that they do that, the crabs do that, the champs encourage you, empower you. They help give you direction. They help give you more confidence. By getting in the room with the right people, the right crowd, your growth will be unbelievable. I was reading about the Renaissance a while back and it's the greatest time for advancements in science and art and all kinds of things in Italy and people were just doing amazing things in this one little pocket, small little place in Europe. [0:12:09.1]
They're coming up with new science, new ways of thinking, all kinds of different things. When they look back at how this worked, there were these guilds. There were… so there was a… like Leonardo DI Vinci, he's a master, right. He's a master of his craft. He's a master artist. He takes on apprentices and these apprentices, they learn from each other and they learn from the master. So in that process, the growth that they had in Italy was just amazing because they had these masters with these new ideas bringing new things to science, to art, everywhere, architecture. The masters are passing it down and the students are learning it and the students are learning from each other and learning from their mistakes. [0:13:01.9]
The growth is just exponential. That's one of the reasons why there was that concentrated growth, medieval times, Renaissance period and I probably didn't do that story any justice. But you get the idea. You get my excitement. It's about being around the right people and being around other people who are trying to do what you're trying to do and everybody grows. Everybody benefits. Even mankind benefits. I hear so many people out there say, "I want to change the world. I want to do stuff. I want to make an impact." And all they think about is what they're doing. They don’t really see how they can actually play bigger, make a bigger impact. They're too selfish. Or most of them don’t even take action. Obviously, if you don’t want to be a crab or a chump, you got to find out where the champs are and do what you can to get yourself in a room with them. This has been, for me, like I said, if I could give my young self… actually, there's two pieces of advice I would give my young self - and that's put away more money and quit being a dummy with it, and that would make a huge difference. [0:14:10.0]
But the other piece would be get in the room with the right people. Find those champions. Find those mentors that can help you grow. Because if you're looking to be world class, if you're looking to rule this world, if you're looking to make the future yours, you got to be a champion and the shortest way to get there is to find other champions to hang out with.
Champions versus chumps - that's what I am thinking about today as I'm driving home from the studio. I've been lucky. I've been lucky to surround myself with champions. Like I said, I've invested over 40K this year, and I'll invest it again next year and more and more and more because I was talking to a friend - I don't know if I shared this story with you guys, but I was talking to a friend and he was miserable and he's making all this money, doing well. [0:15:05.3]
It seems like I just have miserable friends who have a lot of money. I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd, I think. But like this guy is miserable, and I'm like, well, what's up, dude? Why are you so obsessed with money? Because that's all he's obsessed with - the dollar amount - dollar, dollar bills, y'all - that's all he cares about. I'm like, man, I'm not driven by money like that, so why are you so obsessed with it? He says, "I've worked really hard, like more than I ever thought possible to make it to where I am today and if I lost it, I wouldn't, I know that I don’t have what it takes to rebuild it." I felt sad for him. I felt really, really bad. That sounds terrible. I thought about it for a second. I told him, you know, if I lost everything, because I'm not motivated by money - it's just a score card and I can't get motivated by it. [0:16:08.2]
It's been a struggle for most of my life figuring that out because I thought I was motivated by the numbers, but I'm not. I'm motivated by people. And that's what I told him. I said, "You know, if I lost everything right now, which we're doing really well, and it would be a huge loss and it would be extremely difficult and painful, but if I lost it all right now, I feel confident that I could make it all back and more in the next six months and that's because it's, to me it's about the relationships. The relationships is the champions that you hang out with. How many champions do you have surrounding yourself, where you could pick up the phone and make a deal or get some help or do anything you need to do? Think about it. Champions versus chumps. [0:16:58.4]
So that… I should have probably opened with that story, but that really, really what I was thinking about today and I wanted to share it with you. So here's the deal. You know what is up. You know what I'm going to say. You know what is up. You like this? Share it with somebody who needs it. Give them a couple of words of encouragement. Tell them, hey, hey - stop hanging out with chumps and start hanging out with us champs and pass this episode over to them. That is a wrap for Daddy's Working. I'll be back all up in your ear buds next time. I almost missed my turn there. Be all up in ear buds next time.
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