Why Winners Say No | Ep 988

So I made my first million when I was 26. A decade later, my portfolio companies generated last year over$250 million in aggregate revenue. And I'm 36 now. And so in this video, I'm gonna give you the real world advice that I wish someone had told me much earlier. Stop networking. All right. Now this is a really, really important point. Now it's not that I even have some big problem with networking overall. That's actually not my point. It's more that there are there are seasons of life. Right, in the beginning, you're in exploration. I grabbed this from Naval and I really love it. Later on You get into exploitation.

Which is where you go all in. Right. And so the thing is is that in the beginning you're tasting lots of stuff. You're trying to figure out what you are good at or have some proclivity towards. When you have that proclivity, then it becomes very clear now is the time to cut everything else so that we can focus and go deep. Right. So you go broad in the beginning so that you can figure out what you to go deep on. The broad period that you're in is never the period where you're going to make money. Like this is the part you have to get. And I'd say from the beginning of when I started until I really graduated from it was about five years. It's less of a binary, more of a continuum. In the beginning you taste lots of stuff, and then you just have to because in the beginning you have to say yes to things. You have to say yes because you're so bad. You're so scared, you never want to say yes. But you learn to say yes a little bit and then you say yes more and then you say yes more and then very quickly you learn to say yes and get overwhelmed. And so the only way af out of this yes trap is you have to start practicing to say no. And if you're like wait a second, that means that I have to change what I do.

Welcome to entrepreneurship. Like you have to learn, you have to evolve, you have to grow. So let me give you a very tactical example. So if you're debating between going to a networking event, right, or like a lunch with some dude who's like, Hey, we should collaborate, we should synergize, we should maybe trade ideas, let me pick your brain, whatever, right? And if you're picking between any of those things and working Choose the work. Because when the work works out The people will still be there to take your call.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (9 minutes, 2,080 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.