Show Notes:

Delayed gratification sets you apart. “I would say the one trait that separates the most successful people from the least successful people is that the most successful ones practice delayed gratification — that they do not have to win today, that they can focus on tomorrow.”

You can’t get there overnight. “If you could just decide today to say that you’re not going to come in until noon and that you’re going to go from working 70-80 hours a week to maybe 30 hours a week and you don’t have the right people in place, you don’t have any systems in your business, you don’t have a support team, there’s really no capability there that’s been established, you haven’t dedicated years to putting those right pieces in place — then what do you think is going to happen? Of course you can’t. You can’t just say like, ‘Today I decided I’m going to work half the amount of time I was working previously. I’m going to go sit in saunas and cold plunges and make eight figures passively.’ If you could, how disrespectful would that be to the people who put in the work to get there?”

Failure isn’t failure unless you don’t learn. “I approach failure a little bit differently. I don’t really consider a failure a failure. I think there’s only one way to fail, and it’s when you quit, when you give up. Everything else is learning. And I don’t say that to be cute. I say that because if I look back on our journey, it’s a journey of evolution. How you respond to bad news, bad situations, or so-called problems really dictates the growth and progress that you make. I find that great entrepreneurs respond to so-called ‘bad’ problems in extremely creative ways that create leverage and are sometimes the best things that ever happen to them. And then I find that poor entrepreneurs — both poor mentally and poor financially — respond to good news in a complacent way. They’re like, ‘We had a good week. We had a good month.’ They get lazier, whereas a great entrepreneur says, ‘We had a great month. Great. Let’s look ahead to the next month.’”

The downside to the shortcut. “What do we always do when we go to the airport? There’s two ways into the Delta Sky Club. There is the elevator, and then there’s the stairs. What do we always do? Stairs. Always the stairs. And that’s my thought also on success. Look, here’s the problem with shortcuts: They look delicious and appetizing. But here’s the downside: You don’t build the foundation.”

Take the stairs. “it is much easier to sleep at night, from my experience, when you don’t take the shortcuts and you actually build the foundation the right way. If you do take the shortcuts, one day you will be exposed — and it will be on a day that you do not expect, and then everything will fall like a house of cards. It’s the little things. It’s the little paper cuts that will destroy your business. If you don’t want to have that real imposter syndrome, take the stairs. There is no elevator to success. Stairs only. And take the stairs in real life too.”

RESOURCES & REFERENCES
Standford marshmallow experiment
Reddit
The Walton Family
Walmart
Crisp Coach
Kirby Smart
Nick Saban
Live Nation
David Guetta
Coca-Cola
Verizon
Red Bull
Facebook
Search engine optimization (SEO)
YouTube
Delta Sky Club
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