How To Go Beast Mode As A Founder

All right, turn on the camera, turn the camera. I got a rant for you. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's— I got a call yesterday from an entrepreneur who was going through something that is so relatable. They were stuck, they're, they're at a plateau, their business is not growing as fast as they want. They were pitching me on all the new things that we're going to do, new features they were going to add, the new new project, and then they told me, start telling me about the side hustle that they got going on. And I had to stop 'em and I had to tell 'em the truth. The truth is stop searching for answers. We are all guilty of this. You know, like if I'm fat, all of a sudden I'm keto, I'm paleo, I'm reading books, I'm listening to podcasts, and I'm not just doing the obvious things. The trap that people fall into is thinking that the answer to their problems is elsewhere, that maybe a, a mentor has it or a book has it, or there's some knowledge that they don't have and that's what's holding them back. But that's really never the case. If I talk to 9 outta 10 people, only 1 might need a strategy change. For 9 outta 10, the answer is up your level of intensity. The best part about intensity is that it's contagious, that you can actually create a culture of intensity. There's a wonderful story about Peter Thiel when he was running PayPal. So Peter Thiel was one of the, he was a CEO of PayPal. He's the first investor in Facebook. And, uh, I was curious cuz Peter Thiel's kind of like, um, sort of a weird dude. And I was like, he doesn't seem like a classic manager, leader, inspiring guy, super organized, buttoned down, running, you know, daily standups. It turns out he didn't really do any of that shit. He had a very simple system. His common sense system was, well, everybody in the company should fi— figure out one priority. Like you, you should have one priority in your brain. You're gonna do one thing. What's it gonna be? And forcing people to figure out one priority, not a to-do list, But a single priority was an incredible forcing function. Everybody had to say something, and if you said something stupid, it would be like, that's your priority. And so everybody picked one priority. But now that's good, but that's just like, you know, the very, very first half of the battle. What's the second half? Actually sticking to that because human nature is everything feels important. I have my one priority, but then there's the second thing that's important too. And then there's a third thing that's important too. And the problem with this that Peter said was that imagine you have three priorities and even if you stack rank them, you said this is number one, number two, number three. What happens is that we often don't know the answer to number 1. Number 1 lacks a clear solution. It's a gnarly problem. It's an important problem, but it's not an obvious problem. So what we do is we just gravitate towards the second task 'cause it's much clearer. I know what to do there, so I gravitate towards the known, right? It's that Warren Buffett story where the guy lost his keys outside of a bar. So he's crawling around on the ground trying to find his keys and the officer says, uh, uh, sir, what are you doing? He says, I'm looking for my keys. He says, did you drop 'em here? No, no, I dropped 'em over there. Well, why are you crawling over here? Because this is where the light is. And that's how most people operate in their day-to-day priorities. We crawl around where the light is. We crawl around doing the known things, the things that feel familiar to us rather than the important things, the things where the solution actually is over there. It's just in the dark. And so Peter Thiel, what he would do is if anybody tried to talk to him about something that was not their big thing, their one thing, he would literally just leave the room. He's like, oh, you're talking to me about that? I thought your thing is this. Okay, see ya. He's like, I'm not gonna sit here and try to convince you, but I will signal to you that this is not a priority by literally just leaving the meeting or leaving the room or just not refusing to talk to you about anything besides your one thing. To Thiel, what he, what he said was, he goes, if you allow yourself to have more than one focus, you've already blinked. I love that. You've already blinked, you've flinched. And he says, you know, you've determined that mediocrity is an acceptable outcome. My singular focus philosophy is that solutions may not be clear, but the paths to excellence and value are. And the path to excellence and value is to have a singular focus. And I believe this to be true. I believe that the mind is a very powerful tool. I call the brain an answering machine. It's just about what question you ask it. If you ask yourself a bunch of questions like, why did this person cut me off? Your brain will tell you because they're an asshole. Because you've told your brain to focus its attention on why this person cut you off in traffic, right? You focused your powerful tool on a silly thing. Thing to focus on. And, um, you know, the brain can really only handle one question at a time. It is not a, as much as we think we can multitask, we really can't. We can kind of solve one problem at a time. It's just a question of what are you gonna load into your brain and are you willing to let it sit there until it is solved? That Peter Thiel one priority philosophy is a very powerful one. It's something that I implement on my day-to-day basis. All right, so first let me dispel some myths because I can already hear you in the comments. I can hear you type it away because what you're thinking is probably what I used to think, which is, Dude, I don't want to work 24/7. That's not my goal. Well, intensity is not working 24/7. That's the first thing. Intensity is a formula. Actually, it is focus times common sense times insanity. That's it. Focus times common sense times insanity. That is what I mean when I say intensity. There's a great quote, by the way. I saw Conor McGregor, and Conor McGregor's story is insane. He went from a plumber on welfare to the highest paid, richest athlete in the world on the Forbes list, to the first two-weight world champion in the UFC. And he did this all in like 5 or 6 years. And there was a video of him after his training session, and he says the following. He goes, I have lost my mind to this game. Like Vincent van Gogh, he dedicated his mind to his art and he lost his mind in the process. That is what's happened to me. But fuck it. When that gold belt is around my waist, when my mother has a big mansion, when my girlfriend has a different car for every day of the week, when my kids' kids can have everything they want, then it will pay off. Then I will be happy. I have lost my mind. And that is the level of intensity and insanity that you can get to if you really do this at a level 12. And not everybody's gonna want to do this at level 12, but you should know what level 12 looks like. You should know what it is, and then you get to decide how you're gonna dial that knob down. The problem most people have is they think they're already at a level 10. They don't even consider level 12. They think they're already at 10 when in actuality they're at 6. And today I'm gonna show you how you are at a 6 and you're not at a 10, because that is a lie. It's a dangerous lie we want to tell ourselves. Uh, the other misconception, by the way, is, oh great, I gotta do more. I'm already busy. I'm already overwhelmed. Now I gotta do more. No, no, no. It's actually the opposite. You are gonna end up doing less. Uh, there's a great Steve Jobs quote. I'm gonna butcher it, but it's basically something like, focus is Saying no to 100 great ideas so you can say yes to the one exceptional one. Focus is saying no to 100 great ideas. Great ideas are ideas that you could totally make a case for, that you would, it would seem smart for you to go do, but doing 100 of them doesn't work, right? You can do anything, you just can't do everything. And so focus is saying no to the 100 great ideas so you can do the one exceptional one. So if you do this right, you're not doing more, you're actually doing less. You're just doing it better. So, okay, let's jump into some examples. And I'm gonna start with some business examples because there's plenty of like inspirational athlete stories or just kind of like general motivation. But this is a business podcast. I am all about business. So let's do the first one. So first one is Mark Zuckerberg. So there's a great story of Zuck when he bought Instagram. And by the way, today, if Facebook had not bought Instagram, Facebook might be dead. Instagram like literally ended up becoming The next social network, it was gonna be his biggest competitor and Facebook bought it. Well, okay, that's cool. That's just a business decision, right? It's a strategy decision. No, no, no. It was a story of intensity. So here's how the story goes. The founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, used to work at a place called Odeo. He was, uh, actually kind of like an intern sitting at the desk next to this guy named Jack Dorsey. Odeo pivots to Twitter, that becomes Twitter. Jack Dorsey ends up being the CEO of Twitter at one point in time, and Jack Dorsey is kind of like his mentor. So. Kevin creates Instagram. Twitter doesn't have photo sharing. Twitter says, we wanna buy Instagram, and they offer to buy it for something like $400 or $500 million. And again, this is, they have the relationship. They were first to make the offer. They offered a big sum of money, so they did what they thought was level 12 intensity. But then Zuck came and showed them what's up. So the way that the story goes down is Mark Zuckerberg starts texting Kevin Systrom. And he says, um, hey, I want to meet, I want to talk to you about buying the company. And Mark's intensity is almost known. It's sort of legendary in the industry. So Kevin is texting his investor and he's saying, should I meet with Zuck? I don't, I'm worried if I, you know, if I go there, I don't really want to sell. And I feel like if I tell him I don't want to sell, is he just going to go into like psycho mode and crush me? And the investor goes, yeah, probably. And so he's like, okay, I guess I'll take the meeting. He already has a deal on the table to sell to Twitter for $550 million. He then meets with Sequoia, the number one VC in Silicon Valley, and they say, you know what, you should stay independent. Instagram can be big. We will fund you at $500 million. So same valuation, but you get to keep going. You get to keep your independence. But he goes to meet Zuck and he goes, unlike Twitter, Zuck did not take no for an answer. So he rejects Zuck first. Zuck says, no, no, no, just come over to my house and talk. Can you just come over today? And he says, I guess I gotta go over there. I don't wanna really piss this guy off. So he just says, okay, I'll, I'll just go over there. So he goes to his house and now this is, Good Friday, you know, Easter's on Sunday. He goes to his house on Friday and he walks in and Zuck says the following. He says, I've thought about it and I want to buy your company. And Kevin's like, I know, but I already said no. He says, I will give you double whatever you're currently raising your round at. So whatever your price is, I'll give you double. And that would mean that Instagram would be worth $1 billion and nobody had ever paid this much for a mobile app before. This would be the first deal of its kind. Instagram had zero revenue. Had like less than 20 employees. It was tiny. This seemed like an outrageously over-the-top way of going about things. And Zuck said, well, look, I can give you a billion dollars for this, but here's the deal. We gotta do this deal this weekend. And he basically pushed him. And this was, again, it's Easter on Sunday. Nobody's working over the weekend. The Twitter guys think that they have a deal in the bag. The Sequoia guys think that they have the deal in the bag. And the mistake they made was they thought that work starts on Mondays. And Zuck just decided to work over the weekend. So he basically said, look, let's stay here and we'll either hash out the deal and we'll make a deal happen, or we'll figure out that a deal's not gonna happen, but let's just agree we're gonna stay here and we're gonna figure it out. So he says, okay. So they basically stay together for 48 hours. Zuck calls his lawyers, he calls his corp dev guys. He says, get over here. We gotta figure out how we're gonna close this deal now. Kevin calls his investors. He's like, hey, I'm thinking about having this deal. And here's the quote. One of his investors says, I sat back and thought, what just happened? Like, holy shit, what just happened? How did he pull this off? And Zuck had this belief that if we don't create the thing that kills Facebook, somebody else will. The internet's not a friendly place. I have to act with a certain level of intensity when we find a deal that's like this. And so over the weekend, just to give you a perspective, to do a billion-dollar deal generally takes time. 6 months will go by, 9 months will go by. Zuck, his lawyers, and the founder of Instagram, they end up cutting this deal over the weekend. They do a billion dollar deal in 48 hours. And, uh, by the time the competition woke up on Monday, the deal was gone. So that's the, the story of how Zuck buys Instagram. And by the way, this is not the first time. He also bought WhatsApp. How he bought WhatsApp was the same way. And WhatsApp had the right culture. WhatsApp also operated with high intensity. There's a famous story that the founder of WhatsApp had the sticky note on his desk and they took a picture of it when he sold it. It said, no ads, no games, no gimmicks. That was their mindset. Every other messaging app was always adding more and more features. They would add games, they would add stickers, they would add some, some ads into it. They would just keep adding things. And they said, the way we're gonna win is we're gonna do the basic thing, messaging, and we're just gonna do it better than anybody else. They were like Chick-fil-A. Have you ever been to a Chick-fil-A? Like, you don't go to Chick-fil-A because Chick-fil-A adds fish fillets on the menu. No, no, no. Chick-fil-A decided to have a common sense strategy. We're gonna sell chicken sandwiches and they just do it with a better level of intensity than anybody else. They sell a better chicken sandwich. In-N-Out does the same thing. In-N-Out's like, we're gonna sell a burger and fries. Is not a revolutionary strategy. They did not pivot. They did not innovate in that. They just brought a higher level of intensity to it than anybody else was willing to do at the time. And so those two fast food chains make more money per location than chains that do 10 times more things, that have a wider menu, that have more locations because they operate with a higher level of intensity. That's the same way that WhatsApp and Zuck approach business. The founder of WhatsApp always said, he goes, the F word around here is focus. He says, uh, I don't think about things that I can't figure out. I don't think about the future. I don't go to conferences and give talks about where the industry is going. He goes, I focus my brain around the things that I could wrap my head around. Like this customer's complaining about this thing. Let me go fix that bug. And he said that the reason they sold to Facebook was because Zuck chased them for 2 years personally. He would meet them for coffee, then hike. No deal would happen. And he would keep inviting them hikes, dinners, coffees. And he did that for 2 years until finally they relented and they ended up closing the deal. Okay. I want to talk to you about Stripe. One of the stories I love about Stripe comes from Paul Graham. Paul Graham was, you know, running YC at the time when Stripe went through it. He met the founders early on, and these were a couple of teenagers that were basically saying, we're going to change the financial system. We're going to change the payment system. We're going to go work with banks. And he's like, these two, you know, redheaded teenagers think that they could do this. All right, well, I'm curious. Let's see what happens. And he noted that Stripe was doing one thing very differently than the average company through YC. Remember, YC is the best of the best. So these guys were uncommon amongst the uncommon companies. And so he called it the Collison installation. He said most companies, when they would talk to a potential customer, they would bump into another founder. They would say, oh yeah, here's what we do. They would say, oh, that's interesting. That's cool. You say, oh, awesome. You're interested. Cool. I'll send you a link. Uh, I'll send you an invite to the beta when we're ready and, uh, and you could sign up. That's what most people do. He said what the Collisons would do was very different. We started calling this the Collison installation, which would be as soon as somebody showed any sign of interest, they would say, awesome, do you have your laptop on you? I can just set you up right now. I'll do it for you. And they would literally brute force get customers on board. The person would open up their laptop and they would literally install Stripe. They would explain it to them and they would onboard them on the spot. And they did this to the first, you know, 100, 200 customers manually. And Paul Graham noted, he goes, you know, I wonder why don't more people do this? It's not like this was some, outrageous strategy. It's not that it was even like that hard to do. He said the reason people don't do this is two things, shyness or fear of rejection. And he goes, also a misconception. He goes, they think that big things come from big things, but actually big things come from an accumulation of smaller things. I thought it was a beautiful way of putting it to understand how a big thing happens is just an accumulation of smaller things. And he said that, you know, many people believe that startups, you know, take off or they don't take off, that your business either works or it doesn't work. And he said, actually, what I've learned doing YC is that startups happen because the founder makes them happen. They take off because the founder makes them take off. And he goes, it's like an engine, right? You can't force something that's never gonna work to work. What you can do is if something has the potential to work, you can crank that engine manually, hand crank it to get it going, and then it starts. And once the engine's started, you know, you've pushed the boulder enough, Eventually it starts to roll and now you're chasing the momentum of it rolling downhill, but at the beginning it felt like pushing it to the top of the hill. And I thought that was a great analogy of how Stripe operated with a higher level of intensity. And if that's how they onboarded customers, imagine how they did the 10 other things. Because how you do one thing is how you do everything. The trap that people fall into is thinking that the answer to their problems is elsewhere, that maybe a, a mentor has it, or a book has it, or there's some knowledge that they don't have and that's what's holding them back. But that's really never the case. So rarely is that the case. Almost always the answer you seek is within. One of the great stories about this comes from Ben Horowitz. He has this phrase, he goes, lead bullets, not silver bullets. And he is talking about when he was running his company, they were at a very tough point. There was tough competition. The company was on the line. It was gonna go, go bust, or they were gonna figure out a way to make it. He goes, my first instinct was to pivot, to try to find a magical win. It's a magical solution, a rabbit out of a hat. He's like, I so wanted to stand in front of my company and say, aha, I have the answer. I, I went for this walk, I met this guy, and here's the answer. We just gotta do this and it'll all work out. He said, but that's not really how it worked. He goes, I, I stood in front of the company and I told them, I said, there are no silver bullets for this, only lead bullets. They didn't want to hear that, but I had to make it clear. We simply had to build a better product. There was no other way out. There's no window, no hole, no escape hatch, no back door. We have to go through the front door and deal with the big ugly guy that's blocking it. We needed lead bullets. In my experience, the thing that's actually come out of this philosophy of there are no silver bullets is that actually there are silver bullets, but the only way you discover them is by just firing a shit ton of bullets that you think are lead. And then you sort of pleasantly surprise yourself when you find one idea, one experiment, one, uh, tactic. That totally works in an outsized way. You find your silver bullet, but the only way to do that is by being the guy who believes there are only lead bullets. So that's, I'm gonna, I'm willing to fire all the lead bullets in order to make this work versus the guy who's gonna run around trying to just find the one magical silver bullet and really take no action, right? If you wanted to look at your pie chart, you should be spending maybe 10% of your time on the idea or the strategy side of things. And it is important to get a good strategy., but it's usually a very common sense strategy. If your strategy is convoluted, if your strategy requires multiple new innovations and leaps of faith, you are likely gonna fail. You are likely deluding yourself into thinking that the pie chart is 80% ideas and 20% execution. It's much more like 10 or 20% ideas and strategy and 80% blood, sweat, and tears. And that blood, sweat, and tears should come from a certain level of intensity, right? It's not simply about working more hours. It's not simply about just burying yourself in the office. There are times where you'll do that, and that's the other kind of philosophy that you should internalize, which is there is a time to sprint. Okay? You cannot sprint the whole time. You cannot always be running your max speed. It doesn't work that way. But you should be able to recognize when you need to change gears and you need to sprint. One of the stories I love, I've talked about this in the podcast before, is the story of Sylvester Stallone. Sylvester Stallone wants to be an actor. And so he goes and he auditions everywhere and he can't get a, get a role. Nobody wants to cast him as an actor. He doesn't look the part. His mouth moves a little funny cuz he had a problem at birth. And he had, he just wasn't the guy. He wasn't the classic Hollywood face. He doesn't give up. He decides to take matters into his own hands. He says, if I can't get cast in a movie, I will make a movie and I will give myself the role. And the problem is he hates writing. So he decides, well, I'm going to, for this, I gotta sprint. I'm going to do this thing the best I can., but I will plow through. I will brute force my way to this. So he goes to his house and he decides to write a movie. He writes the first script of Rocky, the rough draft of Rocky in 3 days. 3 days. Most people don't believe that's possible. He did it in 3 days. He talks about how he did it. I want to read you this quote. This is Sylvester Stallone talking about focus. His daughter asked him, she goes, did you really paint your windows black to focus? He goes, yeah, I did paint them black because I didn't want to know what time it was. It didn't matter what time it was. It was time to write. Otherwise I would tell myself, oh, it's time to, for time for breakfast. And I would immediately derail myself. I would say, well, I'm just gonna have breakfast and I'm hungry. I don't need to know what time it is. And that was the kind of thing, you know, I wanted to eliminate all my possible excuses, all my possible distractions, cuz I knew how hard it was for me to write. I was begging when I was writing, please someone just call the phone. Just please get me to do anything else besides this. But instead I unplugged the phone so that nobody could call. I painted the windows black. He says, 100% black windows, no phone. And that approach of painting the windows black is a certain level of intensity. He doesn't do it all the time, but he knew there was a time to sprint. So one of the key things in life is to identify when a great opportunity comes your way or when it's time to buckle down. This is the moment. It's, you're going on one path or the other path, and that is the time to sprint. That is the time you dial up your level of intensity. So I have 3 actions for you. How do you actually go do this? First, you need to narrow your focus. I did a whole podcast on this called Laser Focus. Go watch that. It's like 20 minutes long. It's good. So you need to narrow your focus. You need to stop giving your brain so many different priorities and so many different problems to think about. You need to narrow it down. That's the first thing. Focus. The second thing is you need to write down your common sense solution. I call it a common sense solution because that's the check. Your solution to your problem should sound very easy. It should sound as simple as I gotta go figure out why all these people are churning, canceling their subscription. I need to go solve that. Or I need to make a better product. I need to make a product so good that people wanna share it. That's my strategy. Make a product so good that people wanna share it. My strategy is I need to make 30 sales calls a day. If I want sales to grow, I just need to do more calls. 30 a day. I'm gonna take a giant sticky note. I'm gonna write 30 and every day I'm gonna cross that 30 out and then tomorrow I'm gonna wake up and the first thing I do is I write the big number 30 again. By the way, this is something I actually did. For my companies, write a giant number on the wall. And that number is the one thing I need to do today. If I do that one thing alone, I have made today successful. So you need a common sense strategy that you can execute. So like a no-brainer, fifth grader strategy that you can execute at a level 12. And that's the last question. The last thing you need to do is ask yourself, what was, what would level 12 intensity look like at this thing that I'm doing? Just as a thought experiment, you don't even have to do it., but just ask yourself that question, right? If I dialed the intensity knob all the way to 12, what would that look like? What would I actually do? And I'll give you a very simple example. A lot of people, probably you out there listening to this, have had a goal at some point in time of getting in better shape, right? You wanna lose weight, you wanna go run a marathon at a certain time, whatever. You wanna get into your, the best shape of your life. And we've taken what we think is a level 10 intensity to this, right? I did, I did the best I could do, right? I, I hired a coach, or I, you know, I wrote down my goals and I tried, it just didn't work out. Well, Jesse Itzler, a guy who's been a guest on this podcast, he had the same goal as you. He wanted to get in the best shape of his life. He wanted to get in the best running shape of his life. So what did he do? He hired a Navy SEAL to come live in his house and whoop his ass every day. He said, I will do everything you tell me to do. Whatever time you tell me to wake up, I wake up. However many miles you tell me to run, I'll run. He would train 2 to 3 times a day for 30 days straight. He ate exactly what this guy said. He drank exactly what this guy said. He did pull-ups when this guy said do pull-ups. He ran when this guy said run. It was raining, it was hailing outside, it was freezing cold. He'd get out there and he would run. That Navy SEAL, by the way, was David Goggins. This is before David Goggins was even popular. He hired David Goggins to come live in his house for 30 days. He would come into the bedroom where him and his wife were sleeping and wake him up and say, wake up, bitch, we're running now. Was level 12 intensity. And the sad part is we don't even know what level 12 looks like until we've heard something like this. So if I did one thing for you today, I hope I just inspired you to go figure out what level 12 intensity even looks like. Maybe from the examples I gave you today, maybe from some people in your life. Find a way to see it and find a way to ask yourself, what does level 12 look like if I ratcheted up the intensity of the thing I'm already doing? That's it. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no Days off on the road, let's travel, never looking back.