He makes 3 decisions a year (and beat the S&P 500 for 11 years)

And I was like, what have you been doing? He's like, well, actually, I'm a public investor. I invest in public stocks. You're like, oh, you lose money for a living. Yeah. I was like, I'm pretty nosy. Do you have your laptop on you? Pull up your brokerage account right now. And he did. A few weeks ago, I met this guy in Hampton. And basically, his story is that a while back, he sold his company and he made something like eight figures in money after he sold his business. In money? In monies. We're a business podcast. We've done a thousand of these episodes. He sold his company, made some revenue, some income, some money. Some monies. And I was like, what have you been doing? He's like, well, actually, I'm a public investor. I invest in public stocks. You're like, oh, you lose money for a living. Yeah. I was like, I'm pretty nosy. Do you have your laptop on you? Pull up your brokerage account right now. And he did. I was looking through his whole brokerage account and I want to show you his results. But basically, he's had nearly a 22% annual return for the last decade, which is amazing. But that's not the interesting part. I had this idea where we basically exported his brokerage account and we put it in Claude and we asked it over the last 12 years, how many decisions did you make a year? A decision is defined as how many stocks you bought or sold in a year. And if I remember correctly, he's roughly owned around 15 stocks over the last decade or so, give or take five. But what was interesting is that he only made 2.9 decisions a year. And we put together this cool graph. And there were some years, I believe three out of the last 10 years, he made zero decisions. And at most, he made six decisions in a year. So let me just read the kind of, this is a great graphic, by the way. So if you had put $100 in when he started, so this is 2014, so 12, 13 years. His annual return is 21.8 versus 13.5% for the S&P 500. For three years, he did nothing. That was the longest stretch of no activity. That was 2022 to 2025. And it looks like he beat the market 11 out of 12 years. It was only one year where he didn't beat the market and that was 2022. And basically, if you were to invest around $10 million when he started, I think that math is something like $60 million, depending on what part of the year you started. The reason why it was interesting to me is even though I preach patience, I mean, I preach all this shit. I sound very smart when I preach this. But you and I are very similar. We move a lot and we oftentimes mistake movement with progress. And I thought it was really interesting to see this guy's numbers every single year. Because when you think about three decisions a year, that's four months of just thinking, planning, plotting, not doing anything, zero action. Preston Pyshko What, by the way, what was he owning? Is it like he basically bought the FANG stocks or was he buying obscure things? What was he doing? They weren't obscure. I don't want to reveal too much of his info, but one was a very large travel stock. So imagine a popular airline or something like that. Another one was a popular clothing stock. It wasn't Lululemon, but imagine a Lululemon, things like that. Preston Pyshko And so when you say he's got four months of thinking, was it actually four months? Was he just sitting every day and doing research basically? Is that his actual day-to-day task? Or he was more of a passive investor, set it and forget it, and then sometimes would hear something or learn something and decide to make a change? Tim Cynova So I texted him. I go, hey, I want to talk about this. Do I have your permission? He said, yeah. And then I said, how do you actually make decisions? Because I am curious. 2.9 decisions a year. What are you actually doing? He said, I study a few things that I can understand, and I study them very deeply. I keep very detailed notes, and then I just wait for an opportunity. Blank Company, for example, I had studied them extensively for about six months prior to COVID, and I really liked it, but I thought it was expensive. And so I spent a lot of days writing notes about it, documenting my research, saying what I've learned, reading the annual reports, and I keep an eye on it. And then when the market presented itself and the opportunity presented itself and it got cheap enough, I bought it that day. Preston Pyshko So he is doing the Buffett thing, right? He's basically spending every day learning, and then when there's a moment in time, going ahead and making a position. What surprised you the most? Was it the number of decisions? What else surprised you? A few things surprised me. The first thing is, we love having investors on here from Howard Marks, Ray Dalio, and we're not investors. Not exactly. Sometimes maybe it's a side hobby, but I'm interested in those people because it's such a black and white way to figure out someone's decision framework. Because there's very clearly, I thought about this, I executed this. Whereas with startups, it's a little bit more iterative where you can go back in time and fix something because you can build it on the fly a little bit. And so I'm very fascinated by this. And there's this cool quote. It's by Warren Buffett. He says, his investment strategy is lethargy bordering on sloth. That's the cornerstone of his investment thesis, which I thought was interesting. And I was like, that's so fascinating. And we had Kevin Ryan on the podcast. Kevin Ryan is a guy who owns sort of like an incubator, a startup lab. I don't know how you describe it, but they've launched a handful of tens of billions of dollars startups. And he was like, I basically get one good idea a year. And I thought that that was interesting that a lot of the people who I admire, they do tend to make very few decisions throughout the year. The second thing is that they don't agonize over very small decisions. I know that this is something that I do often. And I think the way that you fix this is you determine what decision is reversible and which isn't. And for the ones that are reversible, don't sweat over them. Don't agonize over them. I actually think there's a world where you're quite good at this, where you're good at categorizing which decisions are important versus which aren't. Would you agree? I do think I do that pretty well. But it's because... On this show, we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. Well, lucky for you, the team at HubSpot, they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple, easy to read wealth guide. It's 35 principles from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Manish Prabhai, Morgan Housel, Cathie Wood, and a ton others. So these are all their frameworks, their mental models, their rules, basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin. You can get it in the link below. My default state is I don't care. So it's pretty easy then. Everything is ruled out unless it has a real reason I need to care. Whereas I think if your natural wiring is the opposite, where you really are anxious or you think about everything and you think about everything, it feels like everything matters by default. If that's your default, it's very hard to then pull down 89 different things and convince yourself that they don't matter to find the one that does. So I think it's a lot of just your kind of nature in that sense of, my nature is to not really care about most things. My nature is the opposite, which is I tell myself, well, the way you do one thing... There's all these cute phrases we tell ourselves. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. Therefore, if you have a typo in this sentence, you're going to make bad business decisions. You're sloppy. Yeah, you're just a mess. And so that tends to tell my neurotic voice or my neurotic voice is telling myself, oh, well, everything matters. But the last two things I noticed that these people... I was trying to write down trends I've noticed amongst these people is that they know their circle of competence quite well. And there was a time where I was telling my friend, I was like, hey, have you thought about investing in this company? And I made this argument. I was like, I'm not actually going to do it, but I do like to study it. And he was like, yeah, that all sounds really good. I don't know anything about that industry though. So no, I would never do that. And I've not ever thought of it. And there's this weird... They say no, not because it's a bad opportunity, just because it's not within their realm of genius. And then the last thing was they tend to write their ideas down, where they will write it down. Oftentimes, you'll notice people write pre-mortems. Have you heard of a pre-mortem where you write down everything that can go wrong? You don't want to do this thing called resulting, where you say, this was a bad decision because the result was bad. It should be, this was a bad decision because the input or the framework was bad. And so they do things like pre-mortem or they journal or they'll make arguments to themselves on why this is or is not a good idea. So those are some of the trends I've noticed. But I thought this was really cool to see on paper how many decisions a year this guy's making. He's a retail investor who's outperformed the market. Have you heard of the Jack Dorsey pre-mortem he did before he started Square? No. What did he do? So Jack Dorsey had helped create Twitter. I supposedly, it was his idea for Twitter and he was the CEO of Twitter for a long time. So his next company was going to be Square. And it is very easy when you just were the guy who created Twitter and all of Silicon Valley has purchased real estate on your balls. And it's very easy to get high on your own supply. And so what did Jack Dorsey do? He humbled himself with a pre-mortem. And so before he started Square, I think he created a list called 140 Reasons Why Square Will Fail. And he wrote down 140 reasons why, and he gave it to- Can we put buying real estate on your balls into the Hall of Fame? You know, sometimes it's like words just come out of your mouth before you can think about it. That one, I had the idea and I made a decision. And I said, I'm going to let this one fly. Yeah. That one just, that's what it's placed in the Hall of Fame. Some farts were not meant to be silent. Let's put it that way. And I decided to let that one rip. Okay. So yeah, so Jack Dorsey wrote this thing and he said it was very useful because it's kind of the Charlie Munger thing where tell me if, you know, all I want to know is where I'm going to die so I know not to go there. And if you know why the reasons your company might fail in advance, you can then, and not avoid that, not avoid the elephant in the room. Well, then you can actually design a company that's going to achieve despite those potential failure modes. You also, so, you know, while you were talking about this, I was thinking about Mark Zuckerberg while you were talking about it because he recently has been doing a lot of press. He's on a bit of a victory lap at the moment. Again. Which feels honestly a little premature because like AI changes every, the leader changes every, you know, six months of who seems like they're dead versus who seems like they're ahead. And right now Muse is doing really well. And so he's really excited and he's going out and talking a bunch. But the stock agrees that it was a good decision so far. Right. Sure. So he's, but he's doing all kinds of stuff. He's dropping F-bombs in interviews now. Did he really? That doesn't seem natural. What did he say? There's two different ones. We could play the clips, but the first one, he's in the backyard, he's barbecuing. And so they were, it was some, he was like facetiming somebody and they were like, Oh Mark, you smoking, you smoking meats again? Cause remember like many years ago when he was trying to be, trying to be cool and casual and he outed himself as a robot basically. And he was like, I'm just smoking some meat in the smoker. And he just tried to have like a chill four hour barbecue stream that didn't go well. So this time he was like smoking meat. Like what type of meat? He goes, whatever the we want. Oh my God. And then the second one he was talking about, he did an interview with Alexander Wang who, Alexander Wang is I think the youngest billionaire in the world right now. So Alex Wang was a kind of math Olympiad kid who then went on to start scale AI, which was like the, one of the first big data companies for these AI labs, meaning the AI labs need data to train their models. Where do you get that data? It's, you know, takes a lot of, it's a grindy kind of operational business to go collect and have clean data for the labs. So scale was doing that. Ultimately Meta bought it for, I think $15 billion or bought like a huge chunk of it and acquired, they basically, a big part of it was just getting Alex. And so they asked Zuck, they go in the interview, they were like, why, you know, why Alex? And he's like, yeah, it's kind of weird, right? Like what is this data guy going to do with the social media guy? And that's going to be like the leading AI lab. How does that work? This is why I just kissed him on the mouth. And he's like, this is my golden child. Basically verbally, verbally kissed him on the mouth. So they're sitting there, this is on CheekyPie and he's, he says, I tried to meet as many of the great founders of his kind of age group, his generation as I could. And I, you know, I would try to meet as many of them as I could. And he, he said, I just realized Alex is the guy, he's the guy and that's it. He's the guy. And he's complimenting him like in this, in this like just more absolute, not overly intellectual thing, but he's the guy. And they were, you know, they were talking about how, you know, meta was getting trounced for when they were doing VR and he was calling, you know, talking about the metaverse. And then it was just kind of like, it wasn't really working. He had made a big bet. I think he'd put like $60 billion. He put an absurd amount of money into developing this, like 10 times the amount that they, they spent developing the iPhone was spent on Oculus and the VR program and had produced nothing on par with the iPhone. So in terms of popularity and users actually wanting it. And so he was wrong in that, but when AI came around, he correctly pivoted to it and he said out loud, he goes, yeah, this is a type of game where you're not like, it doesn't, he goes, you don't get judged by your mistakes. You're only judged by the things you got right and how right you got them when you got them right. And so he kind of has given himself permission to make mistakes, but make the type of mistakes where if I'm right, I'm going to be right in such a major way that it wipes out the history of all the battles I lost because I won the war. And if he knows he like loves the Roman empire, he loves war. He loves his favorite game was civilization. And if you see even his shirts are like, like Latin for, you know, it's always like Latin phrases for like, give me Zucker, give me nothing, you know, like stuff that used to be like about Caesar. And so I just think it's an interesting idea. That's very different than investing of what you were, you were talking about where investing Warren Buffett's, you know, famously is like, you know, rule number one is investing is don't lose money. Rule number two, don't forget rule number one, where it's about having not making mistakes. Whereas entrepreneurship is the opposite. You can make tons of mistakes as long as when you do get something right, you have enough chips on the table and you actually get them right in a big enough way basis talks about this, like in baseball, the most you can get from a great hits for run. But in business, you can get 1,000 runs with one correct swing of the bat. And so you just have to focus on getting those correct swings of the bat because when you do, it's 1,000x, it's a 10,000x. Can I ask you a question about this? I want to ask about the Zuck's up, but for Alex Wang, he's 29. So Scale was a $14 billion company. So one of the largest private companies, maybe top 200 or something whenever it was bought or top 100. When I hear what you're describing, it's sort of like you're saying, Zuck was saying this guy is technical and knows what he's talking about. And I've interviewed all these people, and you almost sounded like you're describing him as an individual contributor. Are you saying that this guy led a $14 billion company? And typically, if you're the CEO of a company that big, you're not the smartest in the room. You're just pretty good at a bunch of the important stuff. But when you described him, it was like, oh, he's a great leader. He's good at everything. And also, he knows AI better than all these other people. What he said about him specifically was his strategic mind, so figuring out what should we be doing, his clarity of communication, so his ability to communicate that effectively, and then his strong beliefs on execution. So for example, for Meta to win in AI, they needed to have an extremely small team working on it, not a big team. So talent density was one of the most important factors in victory in AI, meaning what you don't want is 2,000 pretty smart people on this. You want 20 or max 200 extremely smart people who can all hold the problem in their head, the whole project in their head. And they all know each other, and they're talking to each other, and it's tight, and there's not too many voices in the room, and that it should be extremely flat, and then the way it's organized. So he has very strong opinions that Bzuck believed was the correct answer, and that because of that, they should go ahead and try to pull it off. So that's what he kind of described as his attributes of what it meant when he said he's the guy. So a leader, for sure, like leadership ability. He's not doing all the work. Another interesting part of this was, I think it was on Senra's podcast, and Senra was asking him like, so how did he know that you were good at those? How'd you even meet the guy? How'd you even meet Mark Zuckerberg? Why'd you meet? And he goes, well, Meta was one of our big customers at scale, but he goes, yeah, Bzuck kind of just does this every once in a while. Every few months, he would just hit you up, and he's like, if I ever sent him a question in WhatsApp, like, hey, what do you think we should do about this? I would get this extremely thorough, extremely crisp WhatsApp message that's almost like a blog post length delivered back to me. He goes, that's just one of Bzuck's superpowers, is he's an extremely good writer, he's extremely clear in his thinking, and he's able to, the way most people send short, quick text messages, he's able to send long, thorough text messages in the same amount of brain power, like in the same time that it takes a normal person. And then the exact opposite was true, was he goes, he also is quite humble. For a guy who basically runs one of the most valuable companies in the world, he would always just text me, hey, what do you think we should do about X? He's like, and it wasn't just me, he's sending that to 20 people that are not on the official board of advisors. He's not waiting for the quarterly board meeting to discuss this with these five-star generals. Anybody who we thought was smart, he'll just say, hey, what do you think we're getting wrong here? Hey, what do you think we should be doing about this? And he's not necessarily going to just do what we say, but he's constantly seeking from very smart people their take, and then he's also using that to assess the talent of those people of who he thinks is consistently giving him back high signal on those things. So I guess there's two sides of the spectrum. But basically, there are people where it's a dictatorship, and they, for example, Cornelius Vanderbilt was basically sort of like the Elon Musk of the 1800s. He was the richest man in America. And he was known for just, he would make decisions with very little transparency. People wouldn't know why he was doing it. He was described as shrewd, where he would make a decision, and people would be like, we have no idea why you're doing that. And six months later, it would reveal itself, like, oh, he was right. He predicted this. He was doing all this stuff in secrecy. But then there's so many other leaders that tend to make decisions almost in a consensus way, which is very different from the popular belief on how leaders are. And I have noticed that when you and I, or I have hung out with people that are 100 times more successful than I am, oftentimes, they'll ask my opinion. And in my head, I'm like, I'm way dumber than you. Why are you asking my opinion? And I could tell that they're gathering information. And I have found that to be like a superpower amongst a lot of leaders. Yeah, there's a, what's that thing called Dunning-Kruger, the Dunning-Kruger effect, where if you know nothing about a subject, you have very little confidence. If you know a little bit about the subject, you have this false sense of too much confidence on it. And then as you actually learn more about it, you realize how little you really knew and your confidence on the subject dips, right? And this is why black belts in jiu-jitsu, who've been doing it for 20 years, are the ones who talk about how, like, I'm still at the beginner, I'm a beginner at this. I'm still just figuring this stuff out. There's so much more that I don't know than what I do know. And then you have Jonah Hill, who becomes a blue belt, who's like, I'll murder anybody who fights me. You know, like, it's like you get that blue belt confidence. The blue belts feel like black belts and the black belts feel like blue belts, like it's this weird thing that happens with how much you know about a subject. And it does seem like, you know, some of the smartest people are the ones who are the quickest to A, admit how little they know, B, understand how big of a factor luck is in their success, and C, constantly be searching for insight from people who on paper should be, you know, are less accomplished, less intelligent about the subject than they are, because they know they're kind of always hunting for anything that resonates, anything that has some signal to it. And they know it can come from different places. And they're humble enough to do it. The shitty part about doing this podcast is I signed up for an executive coach and I've like done three or four sessions with them, plus this like assessment. And he was like, you're really self-critical of yourself. I'm like, dude, it really sucks. My job is I hang out with the people who are the best in the world at everything they do. And he was like, you described yourself as lazy. You said that you're not ambitious. He's like, you seem very ambitious. I'm like, I am hanging out with literally the 30th richest person on earth. When you compare like whatever it is I am doing compared to that, it is actually quite challenging because I realize what the levels are and how high they go. And every once in a while, I will definitely like shit on myself for feeling that way. Do you feel that way sometimes? I mean, I try not to, but I definitely feel that way. You know, what are the comparison, thief of joy bullshit? You know, like, yeah, that that's definitely true. The only way to cope with it is to do two things. One, get comfortable in the game you're playing that I'm not playing the game that those guys are playing. Those guys are trying to change the world or they're trying to be the richest guy in the world or they're trying to have the most power. They want to run for president. I don't want to do any of those things. And you know, so that's that's the first thing is I get really comfortable in what game are you actually playing? And I don't think most people even are aware of what game they're playing in life. If you ask a normal person or even you ask one of your smart friends, do you think they know what game they play? No. And in fact, I've been doing this exercise where I've been asking people like before they ask me advice or whatever, if they're wanting to brainstorm with me on their problem, I'm like, well, where are you trying to be in five years? And they'll be like, I don't know. I've never thought about that. Like there is a even amongst really successful people, driven people. There is a lack of like the end state looks something like this. So I want you to I want you to imagine. Close your eyes and imagine a friend who is somebody you respect, smart, accomplished. Let's say somebody you think is smarter than you and more successful than you. All right. Yeah. All right. If you ask that person, what game are you playing? What do you think that would be the words that come out of their mouth? They'd be like, what are you talking about? Like you'd be like shock. OK, so first they're confused. What do you know? What do you mean really asking me? And then you sort of explain, well, we're all playing some sort of game and maybe LeBron James is playing right now. LeBron James, age 42, is playing a game of. I'm trying to defeat father time and catch Michael Jordan. That's really what he's doing. So he's trying to defy the laws of aging to keep playing basketball at age 42. And then he goes and joins Philly because he wants to win a championship and he wants to really cement himself as the greatest of all time. Right now, it's him and Jordan who are. That's the game LeBron is playing in the NBA. Now, another player on his same team might be playing a different game. Jalen Brown, who just left the Celtics or, you know, got traded away from the Celtics. And he was always the number two there. And I think he wants to show what he's really capable of. He wants to show that. I would say this year he's playing a game of proving himself. It's a prove myself game. I want to prove I'm one of the best players and they made a mistake trading me away. And most of the NBA players that probably if you talk to them, I've talked to a couple of these guys. They're like, I'm just trying to have fun and make a good living. Yeah, exactly. I'm trying to, you know, get this bread while the bread is there for the getting. You know, I'm trying to I'm trying to make my first All-Star team, trying to get that next contract, try to do something. And so if you break it down into the Aaron Sorkin way of thinking about things, the hero has something that they want and there's something that stands in their way. That's a story, intention, an obstacle. And so, you know, for example, when we were in our 20s, what was the game we were trying to play? If we're honest, it was trying to make it. And I think make it meant be a successful person, make money, you know, become a multimillionaire was, I think, both of our goals. Hence, you know, part of the spirit of this podcast, why it works, because we kind of shared that chase. That's when we met and we were both chasing that same thing. We were both playing that same game. Now we played it different ways, but we were both fundamentally playing that game. And then when we got into our 30s, it was like we started playing a different game. It was this family. I'm going to start a family while still being successful, but not in the sweaty, grindy way I played in my 20s. And I didn't know what that meant, but I knew that's what I was trying to do and figured out how to do that through some combination of investing and having kids and doing all this good stuff. And, you know, then you might play a different game at a different phase. And so what do you that person you were thinking about? What game do you think they're actually playing? Probably just trying to do the same thing they were before, which is they're already successful, but they want to go a level a level above and be more successful and more powerful and more prominent. And what's the why on that? They don't they don't feel like they have enough. They don't feel like they feel like they won their game and they need to win another game in order to feel whole. Right. OK, so so I think it's, you know, but if if that person said that out loud, they'd probably feel a little bit silly saying it feels feel stupid. And I don't know, I've never thought, but, dude, I'm just trying to, like, build something great. You know what I mean? That's really like the answer. They get somewhat defensive. There's a great book called The Score, and it talks about how games are this incredibly powerful thing. So let's take a game. The way he says it is the game, like if you decide to play a game, the game decides what you want and who you need to be to get it. So, for example, he's like, let's say you play a game like charades. Well, to play a game like charades, what do you want? It's like, I want my team to guess what I'm doing. And so who do I need to be? It's like I need to be really expressive. I need to be really collaborative. I need to be a great communicator. That's what I need to be to win this game. If that same person goes and plays mafia, it's like I need to be a lying, cheating bastard. I need to be a scoundrel in order to win this game. And it's like it will change your whole personality depending on the game that you play. It'll tell you what matters. You play a certain game and then all of a sudden mobility and flexibility matters because you're playing Twister versus another game that where you're playing, you know, a bodybuilder and you're trying to be as strong as possible. And who cares about flexibility? It'll completely change the shape of your body depending on what game you play. And so I think it's pretty wild that most people put zero effort into this. I just added it to my Goodreads. I'm reading it. Good suggestion. Normally, when you say you read a book, you don't really read the book. So if you've read this whole thing, then I read the whole thing. But I got I got like a voting majority. I got over 51 percent. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know, that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you. And it's due tomorrow. Well, the breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign, copy blog posts, emails all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. I want to give you one more little because we are Krispy Kreme right now, and it's just a full glaze of Silicon Valley CEOs. I want to read you one more, one more little story here about Elon Musk. Can I do that? Can we just finish the glaze? Yeah, I don't think you glazed Zuck, by the way. I think you made. Did you see him? There was a meme of him trying to enjoy. So basically, the thing you're talking about is it was Zuck and Alex Wang, and they were drinking Guinness in an interview with the Stripe founder. And there was this funny meme of him drinking Guinness beer. And they were like, check out Zuck trying to act like he likes drinking Guinness beer. And you could tell he had a little bit of a scowl when he tasted it. And it was sort of like a 17 year old going to the first college party. Like, OK, here's the thing. Everyone's making fun of him. To me, most relatable thing Zuckerberg has done in decades. Anybody who's had their first sip of Guinness is like, what the hell is that? I remember the first time I drink Guinness. I literally had the same reaction. Yeah, I see. Well, he's like to the side, like, hmm. And then he's doing like the there was no music, but yeah, but no, it's good. Just savory. I like my beer creamy. OK, what about a lot of Elon's story that I don't even know if it's true, but it's kind of like, who cares? It's a good myth. It's a good fable, if nothing else. So it says Elon Musk was asked at a private dinner what he would do if SpaceX and Tesla both failed simultaneously. And he lost every dollar he had. I believe this was back in like. According to the story, this is like back in 08, 09, when when Tesla was on the brink of failure. And so was SpaceX after three rockets failed. The question was intended as a simple hypothetical icebreaker. But his his answer lasted eight minutes and the table went silent. Here's what he said he would do. He said he would move to the cheapest apartment he could find by a computer and start building the next thing within 24 hours, not a week later, not after processing the loss within 24 hours. He said the loss of. would not bother him, but the loss of the companies would devastate him. But he would only let the devastation last one night. The building would have to start the next day. Somebody asked, what would the next thing be? He said he doesn't know, and that not knowing would not slow him down. The thing finds you. You just have to be building when it arrives. I think it's a pretty powerful idea. And I wanted to share it here because that advice has really helped me in life. My dad told me a very similar thing. He goes, you know, yeah, you want to know which direction to go, but if you don't, you just got to get moving. It's about motion, not direction. And once you're in motion, it's a lot easier to figure out direction. And it's not that hard to change direction once you're in motion, but it's pretty hard to do anything from a standstill. And so this idea of, you know, you just got to get moving and kind of be in a state of action when you're in a world of uncertainty. Didn't you just have something like that in your newsletter? Was that your newsletter that said something about plan and action? There was a Napoleon quote that was very similar. That's Napoleon. Sir, what is your next plan? He replied, I act and the plan emerges from my action. And I really like this. Scott Galloway had a good one that was on what he said on the podcast. And I remember writing down where he goes, you got to keep your sails up. And we asked him, what do you mean keep your sails up? And he goes, like, look, when shit's not good, it's pretty easy to just get down on yourself and droop. But if you're a boat, just keep your sails up because you want to be ready when that wind comes and it'll give you that boost. But it won't work if you put your sails down when you're down. And I just thought that this is a great piece of motivation for people. It's like, look, all right, you might be getting your shit kicked right now, but keep your sails up because that wind will come. And when it does, it'll help your boat. So this is like a little bit of, you've talked about this, like motivation corner. Motivation is this cheesy thing that you're supposed to be too smart for. But I don't know, kind of loved me a good quote. I do too. We've said basically, motivation is good when you're not successful, but you want to be successful. It's not particularly good when you're in the thick of it. And then it's also good again when you already become successful and you're like, what do I make of all this? When have you applied this to your life? I remember when we were doing our first company and things were not going well. Is this like Blab era? No, this was like in the sushi era. I just remember it was living in an apartment. We were sleeping on air mattress. We had like, I remember we didn't even have like little, we didn't have a trash can. We would just take the garbage bag and we had a nail that we nailed into the wall and we would just nail the garbage bag to the wall. And I remember like, we would go out and if any friend or a girl came over to our apartment, she was just like, what are you guys? This is terrible. And it was like kind of unnecessarily bad, meaning we were letting the badness of our company seep into the badness of our life. And that was a mistake. And I remember one day when we lived in Boulder. You're like, I deserve this. I'm filth. I don't even deserve a trash can. Yeah, exactly. We treated ourselves poorly. We let kind of like the last play affect the next play. If you ever play sports, it was like a next play mentality. We didn't have a next play mentality. We had a last play mentality. Things were bad yesterday, probably going to be pretty bad today. We weren't saying that, but we were acting that way. And our level of productivity was going down. And actually to switch it didn't require anything to change in our business. It didn't even require a new strategy. We just changed our routine. And so we kind of got our sales up a little bit, meaning we, I remember we went for a hike. We just like, one morning we were like, forget work, we're going for a hike. And we lived in Boulder and we hiked the Flatirons. And we were just on such a high from physically doing something hard and having like a win. Even though it was a win unrelated to the business, it was a win to ourselves. And then when we came back in, we like had a better attitude, therefore had better ideas. And we had better ideas. We actually kind of believed in them a little more because we had just had a win this morning. And this is all sounds very basic to anybody who's like lives a good life and has like healthy routines and whatnot. But we were in a bit of a downward spiral and needed to like reverse it and reversing it. Like what we thought needed to reverse was that our situation needed to change or our outcomes needed to change or like success needed to change. And in actuality, we just needed to like do some basic shit to get our sales back up. It's like, get the trash can, go for the hike, clean up the room, wear your good outfit today. Let's go start stacking some small life wins and then operate from that place. So a lot of times people at the podcast will reach out to me and they're wondering, hey, Sam and Sean, how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs? How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack. You see, I actually have a community called Hampton. It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least $3 million in revenue, although we do on average something like $25 million a year in revenue. We have the founders of DoorDash, of Figure, of Bluetooth. All these amazing companies are part of Hampton. And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to my first million, we have a very unique high trust environment. When people apply and go through this vetting process, they're put in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and in their business. And sort of like when people listen to MFM, they get inspired to come up with new solutions for business. That's what happens in real life in Hampton. It's life changing. And so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least $3 million in revenue, and you just want to go ahead and pull forward five or 10 years worth of success, then check it out. The URL is joinhampton.com. Again, the URL joinhampton.com. I think that these things that you're talking about, we can make fun of them because they're small and it seems silly to tell your bros about these small little motivational things, but they make huge impacts. For example, I hate flying. Every time I've flown for the last 15 years, I've been on Xanax. I have Xanax for flying. I hate it. I read this book about a month ago. It's called DARE. D-A-R-E. The drug program? It's the same name, but it's a book on how to deal with panic attacks. And the D stands for dismiss. And so what that means is, yeah, I'm going to get panicky. So what? Who cares? Whatever. A stands for allow and be like, yeah, let's go. I'm ready. I'm open to it. Let's get panicky. R stands for run towards, which is now I want it. I want this panic attack to come faster. Let's go, baby. And then E stands for engage. Once the panic attack has reached its climax, you think, okay, it's passed. Let's engage in a new activity. Let's read. Let's listen to whatever music I'm listening to. Let's engage in this conversation. And I read that book and I had a flight coming up. I had to go to Jackson Hole the other day and I went sober. It was the first time that I've done that in 15 years. And it was because of that one. I read half of the book because I just needed for it to tell me what D.A.R.E. meant. And I was like, I'm good. I'm going to try that. And so I found myself putting myself in situations where I would get anxious. So walk me through. Where did you start the D? Is it at the airport? Is it way before that? Walk me through step by step. There was two. One was, it was the first time that we had left both of our kids for a four night trip. So I was nervous, not because I was going to miss them, but my little girl was showing a little bit signs of separation. So I was starting to get nervous. And so I found that it was compounding. I was getting her worked up. And I was like, oh my gosh. So I started it the night before. But then when I got to the airport, I found myself like, okay, in about 40 minutes, I'm getting on that plane. The door's going to shut and I'm going to get panicky. Let's go. Let's see how powerful this thing is. I'm so excited to put this into place. I'm pumped. I'm going to get panicked. I'm going to freak out for a minute. And I'm going to see how wonderful this new exercise is. I'm so excited. And there is some science behind this, which is basically when you want to get panicky, it's kind of impossible to get panicky. It's like, are you actually crazy if you tell yourself that you're crazy and you're aware you're crazy? It's one of these things where it's some weird logic like that. And so 40 minutes before, I was like, all right, I'm going to feel it. And then when I actually sit in the seat, I'm like, in two minutes, they're about to close that door and it's go time. There's no getting out. I'm trapped in here, baby. It was as if instead of being like, I'm trapped in here with you, it was like, you're trapped in here with me now. I remember it was as if I'm in the octagon. You hear the door close. It's like, you're stuck, baby. And it totally worked. This exercise, which was totally a woo-woo mind thing. Was it night and day, meaning it was a totally different experience or it was just a lessened version of what you usually have? It's messed up. I've flown my whole life. It landed. It's on the tarmac after we landed Jackson Hole. It land, land, land. It takes right off again. And my wife touched me. She goes, why are we taking off again? And I'm looking around and it took eight minutes. And I was like, what is going on? I put my shoes on. I'm like, if there's an attack, we're going to get ready. I was starting to get really nervous. The Israel plane thing had just happened and I'm like, we got to get ready. I don't know what's happening. And then the guy's like, okay, so our brakes went out and I had to make the last minute decision to take off again. We have to go to Salt Lake City now. Now don't freak out because planes have multiple types of brakes. I'm going to do like a reverse thruster. And when we land, there's going to be a lot of fire trucks there. Don't worry. It's probably going to be fine. And that was my next 45 minutes. And I still did it drug-free, but that was... Ladies and gentlemen, we heard Sam thinks that he talked to this. We're just going to quickly test this. Who's locked in with who, bitch. Exactly. Dare this, bitch. Dare me to reverse land? So I freaked out a little bit, but it totally worked. I feel like that method works for many more things than panic attacks, right? Yeah. I think that I saw this great. I've been trying to work with this panic thing for claustrophobia. It's been a huge issue with me. But your panic is about being locked in that it's claustrophobic or that it's an airplane that could- It's claustrophobia. So for years, I wouldn't take the New York subway. And then I started doing exposure therapy where I was like, all right, I used Claude and I found the shortest destination on subway. I'm going to go on it just that day. And I worked on it. And the idea of going on a cruise ship and being in the middle of the ocean, that is the worst thing on earth to me when I hear about that. And so I've been working on this. And so I was studying fear and panic and how to get used to it. And I saw this really cool video with the coach of... Did I tell you about this, George St. Pierre? I don't think you told me about this video. So a lot of investors, a lot of MMA coaches who you'd expect to be these big meatheads, and many of them are, they're really- They're philosophers. They're philosophers a little bit. They're really into this stuff. And the reason they're into this is because getting in your underwear and going to fight to the death in front of a million people, that's a very traumatic, scary thing. And so how do you prepare yourself to do that? And so they start to study this stuff about fear. And this guy, I forget his name, but he's- Arastahabi or- Yes. Yes. Is that the Arab guy from Canada? Yeah. He's cool. He's very thoughtful. He comes off like a philosophy guy, but he's a coach for MMA. And George St. Pierre, one of the greatest UFC fighters of all time, also a very academic-y, sounding person. And he was like, George doesn't like to fight. He doesn't like to hurt people, but he loved training, and he got good, and so he came to this career. But he didn't like to fight. And frankly, he was very fearful. He was not this guy that was like Conor McGregor that's like, I cannot wait to get into combat. That wasn't George. And so what we did to make him less fearful is months leading up to the fight, we would start training the actual day of. So he would eat the meal before training that he was going to eat that morning before the fight, but then we would take it a step further. We got UFC gloves, so not like practice gloves. He would wear the exact ones that we thought he was going to wear. He would dress in his UFC outfit. And then also, before he would train, we would have the competitor's walkout music play. And then we also went and got these huge lights that we'd put around the octagon, so it felt the same heat and the same brightness. And so he could start getting used to these jitters. And I was thinking, I was like, it's kind of interesting that they do this for the scariest thing on earth. But when I have a hard conversation, like I have to fire someone or something, oftentimes I'm going through that motion unprepared, meaning in my head, I've sort of thought about it. And I was like, next time I'm going to actually do a yuppie corporate thing that I'm fearful of, a negotiation, a firing, having a tough conversation, I'm like, the next day I'm going into that conference room and I'm literally going to do the walkthrough of exactly how I feel. And I should do that for everything I feel. And so in preparation for this flight stuff, I found myself, occasionally I would actually pack my suitcase or I would go through the same motions. And I'm like, this feels silly, but it does feel nice because this does make me nervous when I'm packing for a flight. And so it was really useful to hear his perspective on how they would get down to the very granular details of the fight and replicate it so your nervous system was used to it. That's really interesting. And there's also probably, sometimes you really anticipate events. Let's say there's something you're excited about. Think something's going to happen. And often the anticipation is more than the actual thing. And it kind of leads to disappointment. For sure. You see this often with founders who sell their company or achieving something and then you kind of, almost the anticipation was more exciting. And science has studied this, that actually the peak of enjoyment comes in the anticipation lead up to the event, not the event itself or the aftermath of the event. I feel that way whenever I buy anything. The three months that I'm researching buying a new car or buying a winter coat, I love it. And then I get the coat and I'm like, oh, okay. You know what I mean? Just buying, even the smallest things, I anticipate it so much. What happens is, on a high anticipation event, rarely does reality match the high. So this leads to disappointment when it's something you're excited about. Now, when it's something you're dreading, but it sounds like you're allowing the anticipation to happen in a big way beforehand. Well, then when the real thing happens, it's kind of dull compared to what you anticipated. And it almost blunts the effect. It's kind of like using the thing that disappoints you on something you're excited about. Well, it's something you're scared of. You use it to your advantage because the real thing is actually less scary, less novel, has less stimulation because you've spent the time in the anticipatory state. My guess is that that has something to do with it. Yeah, because all the things leading up to anything that you're fearful of contribute oftentimes just more, as much as the actual nervous. thing. So like when you're laying in bed the night before you have to have a difficult conversation, oftentimes that part is more miserable than when you're actually in the middle of it. Well, I used to run track and field and we run these races. And it's not like the UFC and that you get beat up, but it's the same thing where you're like, even if I do good during this race, I'm about to go through pain. All my friends and family are here. I don't want to be nervous. I don't want to embarrass myself. And oftentimes in the middle of the race, you're not fearful at all, but leading up to it, you freak out. And the weird thing is, if I think about like the scariest thing I ever did, probably the scariest thing I ever kind of signed up to do was skydiving. I wasn't really scared going into it again, mostly because I didn't really care. I didn't really think too much about it. But once you start going up and you realize, oh, 10,000 feet is, we're over the clouds. I literally can't even see the earth. And then my friend went before me and I just saw him go, he just jumps and just disappears. And I don't know, my friend is gone. So I'm like, actually, I'm feeling it when I was up there. And the weird thing is that the antidote to the fear was not really like bravery or getting over it or convincing myself that it's not scary. Like that was hard to impossible for me. It was just acceptance. I was like, I'm like, you know, when you skydive for the first time, you don't do it by yourself. You're hooked to an instructor. And I was like, you're not getting out of that plane. I'm hooked to the guy. He's going out. He's going out and I'm hooked to him. It's happening. And just the acceptance of like, well, it's happening. So that part is like, the kind of like, do I, don't I, should I, shouldn't I, I don't want to, I'm going to have to, I don't have to do it. It's going to happen. Once I accepted that it is already going to happen, that already like neutralized, I don't know, 50% of the fear. And then it was kind of more of what you were talking about. I was like, well, if it's going to happen, then all right, bring it. Let's feel the rush. Let's see what this is. Let's go. I want, I want this to go. Let's go for it. Then if we're going to do this, I don't, I don't want to go skydiving and have to do this or be scared the whole time while I'm doing this panic. Let me, let me enjoy this because it's happening anyways. And the acceptance was pretty key to like moving past that first emotion to the next emotion, which was not like, not like still, still had fear in it and that cocktail, but it wasn't like pure fear. Well, maybe dare will change your life too. Uh, it's uh, It already changed my life once. Dismiss, allow, run towards, engage. It was a great little, a great little thing. You should just refilm the commercial with the egg, crack the egg and be like, this is your brain. This is my brain on a plane. All right. That's it. That's the pod. Travel never looking back. All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about marketing school. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot podcast network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Siu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.