10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4…
Oops, that’s where we got stalled on the launchpad with this program on Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
Now we’re at 3, 2…
We’re still not yet at 1.
And we won’t yet be sharing this program more broadly.
But I do want to share it with you.
Do you know this expression?
To pull a thread and get the whole ball of yarn?
Is it something that resonates with you?
I often use it in the context of continuing to drive forward, even if you DON’T know how.
This is especially valuable when you’re stuck, not knowing what to do.
You need hope, don’t you?
Without hope, how can you be motivated to keep taking steps forward?
EASILY, when you’re operating at a higher level beyond hope.
To be sure, you would much prefer to have more hope, rather than less.
But even when things are HOPELESS truly great people keep driving forward.
This is one of my favorite quotes of Jeff Bezos—
“I have realized about myself that I’m very motivated by people counting on me. I like to be counted on.”
Researching Jeff many of his ideas have stuck with me, yet there’s something of highest meaning here.
Leading and being counted on by others can be stressful and hard for many of us, yet delivering for others is our highest calling.
Certainly at Amazon Jeff’s counted on by millions of customers, shareholders, employees and many others.
And at Blue Origin he has the opportunity to be counted on by all of our species.
Keep working it.
Keep getting lucky 🙂
In 1994 Jeff Bezos was watching the Internet explode.
As we watched him say last week in this clip he saw, “If it was growing at 2,300% a year pretty soon it was going to be huge.”
Still, most people had never heard of the Internet.
Nobody knew how it would evolve.
Let alone how any business would use it to make money.
Elon Musk is concerned for our future.
And he wants to avoid feeling depressed about it.
He wants to wake up in the morning excited for the future, so he wakes up to build the future he’s excited for.
It’s NOT complicated.
In fact it’s very simple, even if the future he’s excited for demands a colony on Mars.
This is one thing that surprised me when I began researching Elon.
Because I didn’t know what was driving him I lacked an appreciation for the scale of his thinking.
I’d seen him as going after important, ambitious goals, rather than a leader focused on the future of our species as he’s talking about here:
You see he’s talking about something simple, how you feel waking up every day, and then “tying” this to his view of our depressing future—
I think it’s important to have a future that is inspiring and appealing. I just think that there have to be reasons that you get up in the morning. Like why do you want to live? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future doesn’t include being out there amongst the stars and we’re not a multi-planetary species, I find that incredibly depressing.
This type of clip is common for Elon where often he goes “meta,” tying his goals to a grand mission and purpose.
Here’s the other side.
It’s ALWAYS obvious in hindsight.
With perfect 20/20 backward vision you could easily make your absolute best decisions.
And if you could turn back time, you might make plenty of different choices.
But foresight is entirely different, isn’t it?
Here you have less than perfect information.
You’re in the realm of uncertainty, risk, downside, fear, failure, loss, etc.
But also excitement, possibility, adventure, and potentially HUGE opportunity.
This is one of my favorite clips of Jeff Bezos:
It’s short yet it takes you back to where all this started for him.
Back to the mid-90s where he’s at MIT describing the exciting growth he was seeing online, Jeff says—
“If it was growing at 2,300% a year, pretty soon it was going to be huge.”
Of course in hindsight leaving his job to go after this opportunity seems a no-brainer, but keep in mind that the first question Jeff says he got from the 60 investors he first met was—
“What’s the Internet?”
Since he was a kid Jeff had imagined building things, he was drawn to the adventure and rewards of being an entrepreneur.
Yet it still could have been an extremely hard decision for him.
On Christmas Eve 2008 Elon Musk was hours away from bankruptcy.
Major delays on the Tesla Roadster meant they were too slow getting cars off the production line.
Three failed launches at SpaceX left them barely scratching together enough money and parts for a fourth.
This night it was all on the line.
With most of his chips already on the table, when he might have lost it all, Elon went ALL IN.
He gave Tesla his last remaining cash. Other investors followed.
In the face of imminent failure, Elon drove through.
Something he’d need to keep doing just to keep his baby alive even nine years later.
Do you know that most sharks must keep swimming?
They must keep moving forward to absorb oxygen from the water into their gills.
Otherwise they drown.
The same happens if they’re dragged backwards.
They are a creature built for moving forward.
I don’t get why you’d live any other way?
Maybe it’s a problem.
This year people have told me it is.
Because I refuse to stop and obsess about whatever they think they know from whatever news source they think is the accurate one.
This week a CEO told me that he’s scared the vaccine will sterilize his kids, while another told me that the unvaccinated kid next door would kill her father.
Especially when the waters are this filthy…
You’ve just gotta keep swimming forward.
Do you know what this word means?
It’s the word of the day that well captures what I’m experiencing right now.
Saltigrade is a verb which means, “Moving by leaping.”
In the context of your business or career…
Why move any other way?
I’ve been experiencing something incredible this year.
For years I’ve been steadily pushing forward on all fronts.
But that’s never been my target.
I target quantum leaps.
That’s been my focus since I was a kid.
Not just how to make your life a little bit better.
But how do you make enormous transformational leaps from where you are right now…
To what you TRULY want?
It was the most bizarre thing.
An hour before he was riffing on stage like he owned it.
But now he was frozen like a deer, following the GOAT around.
This part of the show was unscripted and Rogan was unprepared.
Standing up there next to Dave Chappelle he looked like a tired kid at Disneyland needing to be carried.
He was out of lines, but worse, he was out of confidence.
While Chappelle, who’d just delivered a crushing set, was on fire, in his zone, freestyling, lighting up the stadium.
It was pretty awkward, I have to say.
I felt so much for the guy.
He’s obviously a highly accomplished performer.
An hour earlier he’d captivated the huge crowd, but now he was pottering around unable to even blurt out a line, let alone a funny one.
It was difficult to watch, and from our front row seats a little too close for comfort.
You could see the bulging whites of his eyes.
Feel the trepidation in his body along with the awkward silence his words were supposed to fill.
Watching his frozen body, I could “hear” the gears stuck in his head.
Jeff Bezos did something crazy.
Years before the Internet was mainstream he decided to go after it.
Unlike a college kid with nothing to lose, he had a lot to lose.
He had a good, stable job on Wall Street.
Recently married with a new home, he had reasons to be risk averse.
But imagining what the Internet could be, he wanted to avoid looking back in regret.
You’ll see him talk about it in this short video clip.
It’s a classic from 2001 where he’s talking about leaving Wall Street to start Amazon.
See, the thing is, of course now some 27 years after founding Amazon, and becoming the richest man in the world, it looks like an obvious decision.
But going back to when he was making it, the decision was anything but obvious.
What his boss said to him well captures it.
Gratitude is an important practice, right?
You know this because you’re often told it!
But why?
Why is it important to be grateful?
This seems obvious, doesn’t it?
You “should” feel grateful for what you have.
And certainly you want to feel the best you can about your life today.
But, REALLY, why are practices like gratitude so powerful?
See, this is the heart of the GREATEST mystery I’ve discovered in life.
It’s the mystery of mysteries that the ancients talked about.
But it’s a long way from where I began this work.
Back then it was all about—
How do you get what you want?
And come on, of course that’s a GREAT topic, right?
Who doesn’t want to live your absolute best life??
The problem is what was implied in my old definition—
You need your best life to feel your best!
But some tens of thousands of hours researching these topics taught me a new definition of “best life.”
Sometimes you can be giving it everything you’ve got…
And it feels like HELL 🙁
You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?
You’ve got so much going on.
You’re cranking away at it.
Making progress.
But it can just feel like a grind.
It’s not the greatest, is it?
Look, I’d say it’s WAY better than sitting around feeling stuck not knowing what to do.
But still, it’s not as fun as PLAYING full out.
My brother got me started using this phrase.
It might come from the world of sports.
As in, “She’s really going after it, playing full out.”
Before I was using this phrase I was relying on some of my old lines like—
But this phrase has become powerful for me and some clients for a number of reasons.
Do you know this jump program scene in The Matrix?
It’s when Morpheus first takes Neo onto the roof of a tall building and tells him to leap to the other building over there.
If you’ve seen the movie you of course know Neo looks at him like he’s nuts.
How can he do that Superman thing?
Leap from one gigantic building to another?
All Morpheus says to him is, “You have to let it all go, Neo…”
“Fear, doubt, disbelief.”
We all have a dream, don’t we?
It might be a huge lofty dream.
Or simply be a more natural evolution from where you are today.
No matter what it is, you certainly have dreams of what is possible.
Yet, what does it take to actually bring your dreams to life?
Lots of things of course!
And this scene from The Matrix really hones in on one.
People often talk about unlocking your full potential.
Or even the more elusive notion of using 100% of your brain capacity.
Most the time it’s seen as something mysterious.
When in fact it’s SUPER practical.
I’m NOT saying it’s easy to do.
Or how much is possible.
But there is a clear path to doing it.
It’s just, unfortunately, the path I’m sharing with you is one few people will ever want to choose.
Because it demands something that’s near impossible to do.
See, and this is going to sound obvious, BUT…
To unlock your full potential you need a reason why.
It’s like driving a Ferrari to the grocery store.
There’s little need or ability to really open up that powerful engine.
So most Ferrari owners never do.
They’re also not trained to drive to the limit so few even know what that car can do.
It’s the same with human potential.
If your goals only demand an average level of potential from you that’s all you’ll deliver.
Whereas, choose a massive goal that’s way out of reach…
And the only way you succeed is by unlocking more potential.
Many of us are fascinated by BIG winners.
Often we want to celebrate them.
Be fans.
Put them on a pedestal.
Point to them for this or that reason.
I like to model them for one SELFISH reason.
The first leader I modeled publicly and wrote a book on got me in trouble.
Because that leader was Donald Trump!
I never intended to get caught up in the political dumpster fire.
My ONLY intent was to break down his winning influence.
So others like you (and me) can take over the world too 🙂
See, that’s what I care about in modeling other people’s winning.
I could care less talking about that person and what they’ve achieved.
My focus is on getting clear on how they win, so you can do it too.
It’s the same with Elon Musk.
A car doesn’t drive without wheels!
And the same is true for driving your goals.
Missing just one part can destroy your success.
It might be obvious to say, yet it can be easy to miss.
It’s obvious with a car, isn’t it?
Remove the wheels and it no longer drives anywhere!
But in your goals, how do you know if you’re missing a part?
I met with a fund manager “trying” to raise capital.
He’s a seasoned manager who’s already sitting on $3 billion in assets.
But for the last 6 years, he’s been unable to raise more.
“I’m doing everything right,” he said.
“But I’m just not getting the results.”
Then catching what he’d said, he joked, “I guess that means I’m NOT doing everything right.”
“Touché,” I said.
“So what I am missing?”
I wondered what we might wake up to on this April Fool’s Day.
Like maybe all this has been a practical joke.
Perhaps some great truth would be revealed.
Hahahahaha, we’d all try to have a good laugh.
And then keep getting on with our lives.
Unfortunately not.
The energy is heavy right now.
So heavy that no-one could expect to even crack an April Fool’s joke and get away with it.
You might even be dragged through the public square by the social enforcers.
But we also know this time hasn’t been ALL bad, has it?
Families have spent more time together.
Certainly some parts of the economy and financial assets have been on a tear.
Some people’s businesses are better than ever.
Still, it’s hardly a time for anyone to be celebrating.
But we can still be…