Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Hello people of the world, this is Dillon Berry.
(00:02):
How are ya?
This is my podcast called Why It Matters.
And I talk about why it matters.
I think I'm gonna do this whole show
yelling at the microphone.
But here's the deal.
We talk about things that matter and why they matter.
And today I'm gonna talk about common traits
of the world's most successful people.
(00:24):
Or rather, things that lead people to success.
And these are traits, these are disciplines,
these are things that successful people use.
And I'm gonna give you an example.
Consistency.
And everybody that I've interviewed on my radio talk show
from A-list celebrities all the way to emerging artists,
everything in between, industry pros.
(00:46):
They all cited consistency,
especially the creators, the influencers.
They say, I just consistently kept doing it.
I stayed on brand.
I did it day in, I did it day out.
I got nothing, nothing, nothing, then a little spike up.
And then I did nothing, nothing, then a bigger spike up.
And before you know it,
I woke up and I had millions of followers.
Look at Stephen King, right?
(01:07):
One of the best authors, best selling authors for sure
of all time in American history.
Okay, that's a big claim.
But you know, he's done a lot of best selling books.
He got rejected by everybody for years,
but he kept consistent writing.
He said, I'm gonna do 2000 words every day.
(01:28):
Even while working a full-time job.
He got a break with Carrie,
finally got the thing printed up.
It became a best selling book and then boom, that was it.
But he realized consistency,
even in the face of failure, leads to mastery.
It leads to breakthrough.
It's a proven method.
Warren Buffett, debatedly the best investor
(01:50):
in the entire world, right?
He made a ton of poor investment decisions early on,
but he maintained one consistent habit
that he credits for his success.
He read several hours a day.
If he didn't know it, he learned it.
And he read and he read and he read
and he read what other people were doing
and he learned what was working.
(02:11):
And after doing that consistently, he became a master.
And now he's Warren Buffett, you know what I'm saying?
Okay, Bill Gates, think of this, time blocking.
This was his success.
He would experience setbacks all the time, right?
Versions of Microsoft would die.
But what ended up happening is he got too segmented.
(02:33):
So what he said is, okay, I'm gonna start blocking out
dedicated specific hours each day to do different tasks.
I do this myself.
I never used to, I just kind of ran around in circles
trying to do everything at once.
It doesn't work.
You can't be a master of everything all at once
and make chaos brilliant.
You just can't.
When you shut everything down,
(02:53):
you segment specific hours to handle specific tasks,
those tasks get done, right?
So this discipline for Bill Gates changed the entire focus
of everything he was doing.
And he started to compartmentalize
and improve his products and it worked.
He's Bill Gates, okay?
Let's think about Cal Newport, another author.
(03:16):
He struggled with distractions, couldn't finish his books.
Right?
And early in his academic career,
he was all over the place.
He adopted time blocking, I think they call it, right?
Time blocking.
This dramatically improved his focus, right?
Leading to all kinds of influential books.
Anyway, time blocking works, okay?
The other thing that a lot of people talk about,
(03:37):
now I used to work in the art department,
film and television.
I ended up being an art director,
which is the person that handles everything from the props
to the sets being built, broken down, set back up
to all of the things you see behind the actors on a show.
And it was absolutely madness.
(03:59):
And I have some short-term memory problems
because I'm a little bit ADD and I think really quickly
and things go in and out and somebody says the word job.
And all of a sudden it leads to 50,000 different thoughts
in my head about jobs and I can do this, I can do that.
What about this job?
So if you put everything together,
before you know it, I forgot about
why we were talking about jobs
because I'm off building six businesses about it.
(04:21):
So the number one way to do that and to fix that,
and I learned this in the art department,
document everything.
If you don't want to forget something, write it down.
I kept a notepad in the back pocket.
My boss at that time, Jocelyn Boris, who I loved to death,
said, Dylan, if you forget it, you're fired.
She was half kidding.
She said, here's a notebook, put it in your back pocket,
(04:42):
put a pen behind your ear, write it all down.
If you don't, you're not useful to me.
And I did, and I didn't forget anything
because when I forgot it, which was every five seconds,
I just looked at my list.
Okay, Richard Branson, who one of my big,
I look up to Richard Branson.
He's a brilliant man.
He does a lot of good things for the world.
And he happens to be a billionaire,
(05:03):
which usually you don't get all of those three things
in one billionaire.
But Branson had all kinds of failures.
Virgin Cola, for instance, Virgin Brides, fail, fail.
He began writing down every idea,
every meeting note, every observation.
This also goes back to the thing we talked about earlier
(05:24):
about reading everything.
If you write it all down, you can read it, you learn.
This allowed him to track every potential opportunity
and avoid repeating the same mistakes that he'd done.
So writing it down helped him get Virgin back on track
and that ended up leading him into outer space.
How cool is that?
(05:44):
Thomas Edison, same thing.
He famously failed thousands of times
before inventing the light bulb, right?
Speaking of which, he wasn't the only one
who invented the light bulb.
Okay, there was another fellow
who actually came up with a filament
who made that light bulb work.
And I talk about that in my public speeches
and all the rest of it.
(06:05):
But he meticulously documented every experiment
which allowed him to refine his approach, right?
So with every attempt, he could learn
from his mistakes and get better.
He wrote everything down, right?
Everything down.
Now, another thing, and this is huge,
you gotta get your mind right.
When you wake up and you're in fight or flight
and you go to bed, you're in fight or flight,
(06:27):
everything that happened in between was the wrong thing.
You made a decision based off of an instinct
which was not appropriate to the solution of that decision.
And I'll give you an example.
When you run out of money, you go,
oh God, oh God, oh my God, let me just go ahead
and sell my car.
Well, guess what?
The job you are about to get tomorrow
(06:48):
needs you to have a car.
So was that the right decision?
No.
Was it a decision made in fight or flight?
Yes.
You need to be in a place of neutrality
to make the right decisions.
Sometimes in a stressful world that takes meditating,
getting your head right.
(07:09):
Sometimes I'll sit before a very big meeting
or a performance where I'm freaked out
and I don't wanna screw the whole thing up.
I'll sit and do as my friend Noah Lifshay said,
I'll feel my toes, I'll curl them.
I feel my feet, I'll bend them.
I feel my ankles.
I'll work my way up to my knees.
Boom, I'm centered, I'm touching the ground.
(07:29):
And now all of a sudden I'm a part of the world.
I'm not a part of me and what I might fail at
or what they might think of me.
Who cares about me?
I'm part of the world, right?
And the world is much bigger than me.
And I have the contribution to add to the world.
I'm there for them, right?
Get out of your head.
(07:49):
So meditation, reflection, all of that,
whether you do yoga, sit with some fellow
with a really awesome beard and a really strong accent,
it doesn't matter.
The point is get your head centered.
And Jeffrey was amazing at this.
She had all kinds of challenges.
She was demoted from being a news anchor, oops,
(08:11):
because she was very personal.
And news anchors are very kind of,
I would call it a rigid approach to media.
And that's not a stain on them.
And it's a very awesome job to have,
but it's a little bit more rigid.
It's more presenting the facts, not being the facts.
Oprah is the facts, right?
Take that for what it's worth.
She incorporated daily meditation into her whole routine.
(08:34):
A lot of our artists do, a lot of actors do,
a lot of people do.
And when you can set and reset,
you can eventually lead to a creative mind,
not a mind operating on fear.
And so it's very important to get your head right.
So this is this, another one.
Get your head right.
Get out of your own way, right?
(08:55):
Number one thing, number two, number three, whatever,
it doesn't matter, a very important one, embracing failure.
People hate to be seen as a failure.
They hate to be seen as weak.
This is why a lot of men for a long time would never cry.
Well, that's stupid.
What's wrong with emotions?
(09:17):
You know what I mean?
But embracing failure is a learning tool.
When you embrace failure and you also do things
like write it down, you can reflect on what you learned
from that failure and then obviously adapt
so you don't make it again.
Or if you do make it again, you see it coming.
So the, the womp, the impact is not so hard.
(09:39):
So JK Rowling wrote some of my favorite books ever,
Harry Potter, I'm sorry, I'm a geek.
It's just awesome.
The first four books I loved, then it got kind of weird.
You know, when the big snakes and stuff started
flipping around, I was kind of like, eh.
But amazing books.
Again, she faced numerous rejections from publishers.
(09:59):
She was living in poverty, but she embraced her failures
and learning from each rejection,
she created these American, I mean, American,
actually English, these amazing is what I meant to say.
Sorry, I just watched the conventions
and my brain is in political field, which is horrifying.
Anyway, but anyway, so she created these bestselling books.
(10:21):
You know, where did Harry Potter live?
Under the stairs.
How did he feel?
Rejected, dejected, not part of the society,
broke, eating porridge.
These are all very real things that resonated
with her community.
So she realized that this failure actually created
the best stepping stone for her success.
How cool is that?
(10:42):
Right?
James Dyson.
All right, he went through 5,127 failed prototypes
before finally creating the first bagless vacuum cleaner.
Tell me one person listening to this
that doesn't love having a vacuum cleaner without a bag.
(11:04):
Right?
Each failure taught him something new.
Eventually, it led to Dyson, which is a bomb ass vacuum.
I got one of them tornado deals, man.
I got to tell you, it's lovely,
especially when you have an 85 pound hairy dog
and a 45 pound hairy dog and a bunny and a cat.
Yeah, I live on a farm all day, son.
(11:27):
Anyway, deliberate practice.
This is huge.
Anybody who watches any sports star
that is at the top of their game
will cite this deliberate practice.
Kobe Bryant.
Bryant missed thousands of shots during his career,
but his commitment to deliberate practice,
that's what made it work, right?
(11:48):
Intensely improving specific aspects of his game.
The lethal shooter, you got to check this guy out.
He's dope on Instagram.
This guy, it's like no matter where he throws the ball from,
it always goes in the hoop.
Dude Perfect, you all know you're editing.
This guy's not editing.
He's hitting it every time.
It's crazy.
Deliberate practice, every single motion
(12:09):
over and over and over and over and over.
When you do that, your averages get way better.
You get way better success.
Of course, use all those other things.
Get your mind right.
Get your head right.
Do it over and over.
Consistency, deliberate practice.
They're all intertwined disciplines
that make for successful people.
(12:30):
If you don't, you walk in, like I know so many musicians.
I'm gonna be a rock star.
I'm gonna sing a song.
But they don't practice.
They don't learn the fundamentals.
They don't understand how to keep their breath
so they don't run out of it.
When you're at a show and all this like this,
you sing like freaking Axl Roses right now.
It's horrifying.
Learn your craft.
(12:50):
Axl, I'm sorry I picked on you, but come on, bro.
You had a good time.
Okay.
This is very important to think about.
Now there's this famous psychologist, Anders Ericsson.
He's known for his research.
He's an expert at dealing with these theories
of deliberate practice, right?
(13:12):
But he had to do rigorous testing
over and over and over and over
and eventually shaped an understanding
for how people achieve high level performance.
He did this basically by achieving high level performance
through deliberate practice, right?
So delivering focused, deliberate efforts, right?
(13:35):
Practice on your weaknesses
is key to mastery in every field.
What's that guy who wrote the book about,
a thousand hours or whatever it is.
It's just deliberate practice.
Go over and over and over and over.
Iterate test, iterate test till you get it right.
Consistency, discipline, get your mind right.
This is not rocket science, you guys.
(13:57):
And you know when you're not doing it.
You know when you wake up and you're like, I didn't do it.
I know it's a problem.
I didn't fix it.
I know I'm stressed.
I didn't chill myself out
before I went into the business meeting.
And then I got pissed at Raj and Raj fired you.
Or you know, you regretted it.
Or you said something to somebody out of anger,
(14:19):
out of fight or flight
because you didn't get your head right,
that you regretted.
You know, we all do this, right?
We all do this.
But the ones that are winning
that you're probably frustrated with,
that probably got the job and you got passed up
or probably won the gold
and maybe you got bronze or came in fourth,
(14:41):
they work harder than you.
They may be more naturally talented
given the gobees of the world, the Oprah's,
the Barack Obama's, you know,
they got a little something extra in the DNA
that gives them an advantage for sure.
But deliberate practice, you can get that good.
You can even be better.
You can even work harder than them.
(15:03):
It's interesting.
Now, the other thing is,
and this is a really important thing.
All those skills don't mean anything
if you can't network and build relationships, right?
You could be the smartest person in the world,
but even Darwin needed a manufacturer
to fund his stuff and put it out, you know.
Nobody would have a light bulb
if you sit in his room and couldn't talk to people
and get some things done.
(15:25):
So, you know, look at like LinkedIn's co-founder,
Reid Hoffman.
You know, his first social networking platform,
social net failed miserably, right?
But he learned from this.
He focused on building meaningful connections
in the business world,
which led him to the success and the creation of LinkedIn.
Right, he realized that success would come
(15:46):
not just from the ideas, but from the relationships.
Now, I, sorry, Reid, but I'm building an app
that's gonna ruin yours, and I love you, brother,
but we're coming for you.
I'll tell y'all more about that later,
but I just acquired 50% of this app that we're rebranding,
but it's called DirectRope now,
(16:06):
and it's way better than LinkedIn.
So, but I'm gonna learn from you.
Damn right, I'm gonna learn from you, Reid Hoffman,
and I'm gonna read all about you and what you've done,
and we're gonna move forward.
So the guy who started Starbucks,
this dude, same thing, right?
Howard Schultz is his name.
(16:27):
He couldn't convince investors to fund his idea
of the coffee house culture, right?
This wasn't just a coffee house, it was culture.
It was, we're gonna take care of our baristas.
They're gonna be bright, cool, neat people
that you wanna talk to, not, what do you want?
Coffee, blank.
No, they were like, hey, what's going on?
How's your day?
(16:47):
We're good.
They got good benefits.
They created a culture around coffee.
Love or hate them.
Seven bucks a coffee is exordinate, my dudes,
but, you know, I'm from Seattle,
so no more power to you, baby.
I know you took the Serena Gorda.
Now, this is the other thing I have a problem with
with Starbucks, if I could sidebar a little bit.
Y'all had Serena Gorda on there, right?
(17:08):
Serena Gorda was not a beauty queen.
It's just Serena Gorda, man, you know what I'm saying?
She's a mermaid, you know, a well-endowed mermaid at that.
But you took her off to make her prettier and smaller.
Why did you do that?
Ain't nothing wrong with Serena Gorda.
(17:28):
You know, make your coffee more approachable.
Come on, guys.
Put Serena Gorda back on that books cop of yours.
You'll see what I'm saying.
Anyway.
So basically, he built a strong relationship-based culture.
They put your name on your cup.
They greet you by your name on the app, right?
(17:50):
You feel like you're a part of a community.
You get to know your Starbucks people, right?
And I know it's all over the place now,
and it seems ridiculous,
but still that coffee culture worked, was built on that.
It's brilliant.
Okay, I'll give you a couple more
then I'm gonna leave you alone.
Continuous feedback.
Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO.
(18:11):
He turned his failures into successes too.
Schmidt recognized early on
that his leadership style needed improvement, okay?
He saw continuous feedback from his team.
How can I be better?
What can I do better?
They helped him involve and steer Google
to be all of these things it is now,
which I won't say that I hail Google.
(18:31):
I use Google all the time.
I know Google is definitely part of the axis of evil.
Sorry, Google, but it's true.
Come on, y'all are everywhere.
Probably in the other room on my Google device,
you're recording everything I'm saying,
and then you're gonna come after me and shadow ban me.
I don't know, whatever.
But the point here is,
(18:54):
Eric Schmidt took valuable advice.
He recognized that he needed help and he asked people,
what am I doing wrong?
How could I be better?
You almost don't even need to ask people.
They're gonna tell you in various ways.
When you say something like, I'm the kind of person
and nobody in the room says anything,
is I'm the kind of person who's really honorable
(19:16):
and always do what I say I'm gonna do
and everybody in the room's quiet.
Guess what?
They don't think you are.
You gotta change that.
All right, when you say things like,
hey, I think I'm the one who should do that
and nobody says anything, there's a reason for it.
Ask them why they think that,
(19:36):
why they don't believe in you in that way.
Those relationships are all you got in life.
If you're not able to better yourself,
you end up killing your own business,
your own efforts, your own public standing,
whatever it is.
You're not valuable to the rest of the world
if you render yourself invaluable
by not fixing your problems.
(19:58):
It's a weakness.
Don't be weak.
Weak isn't being weak.
Weak is not making your deficits a gain, you know what I mean?
Make your weaknesses your strengths.
That's what the best in the world do.
You wanna be the best in the world,
that's what you gotta do.
So another thing is strategic risk taking.
(20:19):
And I wrote the book on this
because my entire life has been taking strategic risks.
And thankfully I had just enough of them pin out
that I've had a life in the entertainment industry
and it's been fantastic.
It's been very difficult and erratic
and up and down and all around
and going from sleeping in my truck
(20:40):
to making extra zeros on things
to mailbox money and beyond.
You know, you really can appreciate taking risks
especially when you win them.
Sucks when you lose them
but gotta keep taking them till you win them.
Consistency, go back to the earlier lessons.
Sarah Blakely.
(21:01):
Now many, many people in the world
would hail Sarah Blakely as a salvation for their lives
because she created Spanx.
Spanx keeps your butt together.
You know what I'm saying?
She's a lady and you got a butt.
You need to kind of firm up.
You put on some Spanx.
Thank you, Sarah Blakely.
(21:23):
So Blakely took a major risk
in investing her entire savings
and developing underpants
that firm up your floppy flapjack ass.
Sorry, I had to say it.
I was kind of fun though, I didn't say that.
Sorry, I never said I was PC, okay?
I never said it.
(21:43):
So despite those early rejections,
see, she used strategy to push it forward
leading this company to a billion dollar valuation
and beyond, right?
Because there's a lot of people
that wanna have a nice looking butt.
She came to find out.
But you know, she did that.
Jeff Bezos, same thing.
(22:03):
Early on, Amazon faced all kinds of problems, right?
It was trying to launch new product lines, web services
but the risks paid off
because taking the strategic risk,
especially when your core brand of Amazon
is selling books,
you went from selling books to selling everything
to selling web services, okay?
(22:24):
Now given, it did pretty well with the book part
so they could take those risks
but strategic risks do pay off
if you're strategic about them, right?
You have to think about that.
Self-reflection and course correction.
Now, as much as Steve Jobs,
everyone loves Steve Jobs,
(22:45):
all the iPhone owners that give me a hard time
about having a droid,
which I just like because the camera's better
and the screen's better
but everybody up and down will swear
that the Apple's better.
I'm like, go look and find out
who actually made that camera
you're talking shit about in your iPhone.
It was the same people that made droid.
(23:06):
Okay, Samsung.
So shut up, iPhone owners.
Anyway, love you iPhone owners
but Steve Jobs, who everyone hails as a hero,
he's a great salesman, not my favorite, okay?
Steve Jobs, which is another reason
I don't really have an iPhone
but I do have Apple everything else
I can't really say too much
(23:27):
but Steve Jobs never gave a dime to charity, you know, never
and he was very mean to his people
and he was actually not a nice fellow
but he made great product
and he was great at selling them
and, you know, Apple was bomb
and his aesthetic was bomb
but so here's the good thing about, you know,
self-reflection and self-correction.
He was ousted from Apple, Jobs was
(23:50):
because he was an asshole, quite frankly
but he took time to reflect
and eventually relaunched successful ventures
like Pixar, Next, his return to Apple
was after he had learned his lesson, right?
And then he launched the iPhone and everything else
because you need people, you need people to support you
(24:11):
don't matter how visionary you are, right, Kanye?
Because sometimes you can say shit
that eventually pisses people off beyond repair
and eventually things catch up with you, right, Diddy?
Sorry, had to say it.
I always knew that dude was tough.
But moving on.
(24:33):
Uh, if you make your failures, your successes
and you understand that sometimes you have to step back,
lick your wounds and reassess your path
to get forward in anything, no matter how big you are
Steve Jobs got fired by Apple, fired.
(24:56):
Bye bye, you're fired.
Clean out your desk, Steve Jobs
and walk out of our spaceship.
He went back to the drawing board.
He thought about it.
He made himself better.
I don't know how.
Did he de-assolify himself?
I'm not sure.
And then he went back to Apple
(25:17):
and he did great things for Apple
that all you people will tell me all about
every time I see your iPhone when I pull my droid out.
Anyway, this is Dylan Barry.
This is why it matters.
And why does all this matter?
It matters because we all wanna get better and do better.
And some of you are convincing yourselves
that you're doing that and you're not.
And you know you're not.
(25:38):
Because you're not being consistent.
You're not reading more.
You're not writing everything down.
You're not putting in 2000 words a day.
You're not.
And if you wanna be great and you're not,
don't bitch about not being great.
Get to work, do what it takes to be great.
Do what it takes to be great.
(25:58):
Okay?
This is Dylan Barry.
Why it matters.
Make yourself better.
You got it.
I got it.
We got it.
We all in this mess together.
I'll talk to y'all later.
Big love.
And that's my point, Kev.
I'm out.
Hello people of the world, this is Dillon Berry.
(00:02):
How are ya?
This is my podcast called Why It Matters.
And I talk about why it matters.
I think I'm gonna do this whole show
yelling at the microphone.
But here's the deal.
We talk about things that matter and why they matter.
And today I'm gonna talk about common traits
of the world's most successful people.
(00:24):
Or rather, things that lead people to success.
And these are traits, these are disciplines,
these are things that successful people use.
And I'm gonna give you an example.
Consistency.
And everybody that I've interviewed on my radio talk show
from A-list celebrities all the way to emerging artists,
everything in between, industry pros.
(00:46):
They all cited consistency,
especially the creators, the influencers.
They say, I just consistently kept doing it.
I stayed on brand.
I did it day in, I did it day out.
I got nothing, nothing, nothing, then a little spike up.
And then I did nothing, nothing, then a bigger spike up.
And before you know it,
I woke up and I had millions of followers.
Look at Stephen King, right?
(01:07):
One of the best authors, best selling authors for sure
of all time in American history.
Okay, that's a big claim.
But you know, he's done a lot of best selling books.
He got rejected by everybody for years,
but he kept consistent writing.
He said, I'm gonna do 2000 words every day.
(01:28):
Even while working a full-time job.
He got a break with Carrie,
finally got the thing printed up.
It became a best selling book and then boom, that was it.
But he realized consistency,
even in the face of failure, leads to mastery.
It leads to breakthrough.
It's a proven method.
Warren Buffett, debatedly the best investor
(01:50):
in the entire world, right?
He made a ton of poor investment decisions early on,
but he maintained one consistent habit
that he credits for his success.
He read several hours a day.
If he didn't know it, he learned it.
And he read and he read and he read
and he read what other people were doing
and he learned what was working.
(02:11):
And after doing that consistently, he became a master.
And now he's Warren Buffett, you know what I'm saying?
Okay, Bill Gates, think of this, time blocking.
This was his success.
He would experience setbacks all the time, right?
Versions of Microsoft would die.
But what ended up happening is he got too segmented.
(02:33):
So what he said is, okay, I'm gonna start blocking out
dedicated specific hours each day to do different tasks.
I do this myself.
I never used to, I just kind of ran around in circles
trying to do everything at once.
It doesn't work.
You can't be a master of everything all at once
and make chaos brilliant.
You just can't.
When you shut everything down,
(02:53):
you segment specific hours to handle specific tasks,
those tasks get done, right?
So this discipline for Bill Gates changed the entire focus
of everything he was doing.
And he started to compartmentalize
and improve his products and it worked.
He's Bill Gates, okay?
Let's think about Cal Newport, another author.
(03:16):
He struggled with distractions, couldn't finish his books.
Right?
And early in his academic career,
he was all over the place.
He adopted time blocking, I think they call it, right?
Time blocking.
This dramatically improved his focus, right?
Leading to all kinds of influential books.
Anyway, time blocking works, okay?
The other thing that a lot of people talk about,
(03:37):
now I used to work in the art department,
film and television.
I ended up being an art director,
which is the person that handles everything from the props
to the sets being built, broken down, set back up
to all of the things you see behind the actors on a show.
And it was absolutely madness.
(03:59):
And I have some short-term memory problems
because I'm a little bit ADD and I think really quickly
and things go in and out and somebody says the word job.
And all of a sudden it leads to 50,000 different thoughts
in my head about jobs and I can do this, I can do that.
What about this job?
So if you put everything together,
before you know it, I forgot about
why we were talking about jobs
because I'm off building six businesses about it.
(04:21):
So the number one way to do that and to fix that,
and I learned this in the art department,
document everything.
If you don't want to forget something, write it down.
I kept a notepad in the back pocket.
My boss at that time, Jocelyn Boris, who I loved to death,
said, Dylan, if you forget it, you're fired.
She was half kidding.
She said, here's a notebook, put it in your back pocket,
(04:42):
put a pen behind your ear, write it all down.
If you don't, you're not useful to me.
And I did, and I didn't forget anything
because when I forgot it, which was every five seconds,
I just looked at my list.
Okay, Richard Branson, who one of my big,
I look up to Richard Branson.
He's a brilliant man.
He does a lot of good things for the world.
And he happens to be a billionaire,
(05:03):
which usually you don't get all of those three things
in one billionaire.
But Branson had all kinds of failures.
Virgin Cola, for instance, Virgin Brides, fail, fail.
He began writing down every idea,
every meeting note, every observation.
This also goes back to the thing we talked about earlier
(05:24):
about reading everything.
If you write it all down, you can read it, you learn.
This allowed him to track every potential opportunity
and avoid repeating the same mistakes that he'd done.
So writing it down helped him get Virgin back on track
and that ended up leading him into outer space.
How cool is that?
(05:44):
Thomas Edison, same thing.
He famously failed thousands of times
before inventing the light bulb, right?
Speaking of which, he wasn't the only one
who invented the light bulb.
Okay, there was another fellow
who actually came up with a filament
who made that light bulb work.
And I talk about that in my public speeches
and all the rest of it.
(06:05):
But he meticulously documented every experiment
which allowed him to refine his approach, right?
So with every attempt, he could learn
from his mistakes and get better.
He wrote everything down, right?
Everything down.
Now, another thing, and this is huge,
you gotta get your mind right.
When you wake up and you're in fight or flight
and you go to bed, you're in fight or flight,
(06:27):
everything that happened in between was the wrong thing.
You made a decision based off of an instinct
which was not appropriate to the solution of that decision.
And I'll give you an example.
When you run out of money, you go,
oh God, oh God, oh my God, let me just go ahead
and sell my car.
Well, guess what?
The job you are about to get tomorrow
(06:48):
needs you to have a car.
So was that the right decision?
No.
Was it a decision made in fight or flight?
Yes.
You need to be in a place of neutrality
to make the right decisions.
Sometimes in a stressful world that takes meditating,
getting your head right.
(07:09):
Sometimes I'll sit before a very big meeting
or a performance where I'm freaked out
and I don't wanna screw the whole thing up.
I'll sit and do as my friend Noah Lifshay said,
I'll feel my toes, I'll curl them.
I feel my feet, I'll bend them.
I feel my ankles.
I'll work my way up to my knees.
Boom, I'm centered, I'm touching the ground.
(07:29):
And now all of a sudden I'm a part of the world.
I'm not a part of me and what I might fail at
or what they might think of me.
Who cares about me?
I'm part of the world, right?
And the world is much bigger than me.
And I have the contribution to add to the world.
I'm there for them, right?
Get out of your head.
(07:49):
So meditation, reflection, all of that,
whether you do yoga, sit with some fellow
with a really awesome beard and a really strong accent,
it doesn't matter.
The point is get your head centered.
And Jeffrey was amazing at this.
She had all kinds of challenges.
She was demoted from being a news anchor, oops,
(08:11):
because she was very personal.
And news anchors are very kind of,
I would call it a rigid approach to media.
And that's not a stain on them.
And it's a very awesome job to have,
but it's a little bit more rigid.
It's more presenting the facts, not being the facts.
Oprah is the facts, right?
Take that for what it's worth.
She incorporated daily meditation into her whole routine.
(08:34):
A lot of our artists do, a lot of actors do,
a lot of people do.
And when you can set and reset,
you can eventually lead to a creative mind,
not a mind operating on fear.
And so it's very important to get your head right.
So this is this, another one.
Get your head right.
Get out of your own way, right?
(08:55):
Number one thing, number two, number three, whatever,
it doesn't matter, a very important one, embracing failure.
People hate to be seen as a failure.
They hate to be seen as weak.
This is why a lot of men for a long time would never cry.
Well, that's stupid.
What's wrong with emotions?
(09:17):
You know what I mean?
But embracing failure is a learning tool.
When you embrace failure and you also do things
like write it down, you can reflect on what you learned
from that failure and then obviously adapt
so you don't make it again.
Or if you do make it again, you see it coming.
So the, the womp, the impact is not so hard.
(09:39):
So JK Rowling wrote some of my favorite books ever,
Harry Potter, I'm sorry, I'm a geek.
It's just awesome.
The first four books I loved, then it got kind of weird.
You know, when the big snakes and stuff started
flipping around, I was kind of like, eh.
But amazing books.
Again, she faced numerous rejections from publishers.
(09:59):
She was living in poverty, but she embraced her failures
and learning from each rejection,
she created these American, I mean, American,
actually English, these amazing is what I meant to say.
Sorry, I just watched the conventions
and my brain is in political field, which is horrifying.
Anyway, but anyway, so she created these bestselling books.
(10:21):
You know, where did Harry Potter live?
Under the stairs.
How did he feel?
Rejected, dejected, not part of the society,
broke, eating porridge.
These are all very real things that resonated
with her community.
So she realized that this failure actually created
the best stepping stone for her success.
How cool is that?
(10:42):
Right?
James Dyson.
All right, he went through 5,127 failed prototypes
before finally creating the first bagless vacuum cleaner.
Tell me one person listening to this
that doesn't love having a vacuum cleaner without a bag.
(11:04):
Right?
Each failure taught him something new.
Eventually, it led to Dyson, which is a bomb ass vacuum.
I got one of them tornado deals, man.
I got to tell you, it's lovely,
especially when you have an 85 pound hairy dog
and a 45 pound hairy dog and a bunny and a cat.
Yeah, I live on a farm all day, son.
(11:27):
Anyway, deliberate practice.
This is huge.
Anybody who watches any sports star
that is at the top of their game
will cite this deliberate practice.
Kobe Bryant.
Bryant missed thousands of shots during his career,
but his commitment to deliberate practice,
that's what made it work, right?
(11:48):
Intensely improving specific aspects of his game.
The lethal shooter, you got to check this guy out.
He's dope on Instagram.
This guy, it's like no matter where he throws the ball from,
it always goes in the hoop.
Dude Perfect, you all know you're editing.
This guy's not editing.
He's hitting it every time.
It's crazy.
Deliberate practice, every single motion
(12:09):
over and over and over and over and over.
When you do that, your averages get way better.
You get way better success.
Of course, use all those other things.
Get your mind right.
Get your head right.
Do it over and over.
Consistency, deliberate practice.
They're all intertwined disciplines
that make for successful people.
(12:30):
If you don't, you walk in, like I know so many musicians.
I'm gonna be a rock star.
I'm gonna sing a song.
But they don't practice.
They don't learn the fundamentals.
They don't understand how to keep their breath
so they don't run out of it.
When you're at a show and all this like this,
you sing like freaking Axl Roses right now.
It's horrifying.
Learn your craft.
(12:50):
Axl, I'm sorry I picked on you, but come on, bro.
You had a good time.
Okay.
This is very important to think about.
Now there's this famous psychologist, Anders Ericsson.
He's known for his research.
He's an expert at dealing with these theories
of deliberate practice, right?
(13:12):
But he had to do rigorous testing
over and over and over and over
and eventually shaped an understanding
for how people achieve high level performance.
He did this basically by achieving high level performance
through deliberate practice, right?
So delivering focused, deliberate efforts, right?
(13:35):
Practice on your weaknesses
is key to mastery in every field.
What's that guy who wrote the book about,
a thousand hours or whatever it is.
It's just deliberate practice.
Go over and over and over and over.
Iterate test, iterate test till you get it right.
Consistency, discipline, get your mind right.
This is not rocket science, you guys.
(13:57):
And you know when you're not doing it.
You know when you wake up and you're like, I didn't do it.
I know it's a problem.
I didn't fix it.
I know I'm stressed.
I didn't chill myself out
before I went into the business meeting.
And then I got pissed at Raj and Raj fired you.
Or you know, you regretted it.
Or you said something to somebody out of anger,
(14:19):
out of fight or flight
because you didn't get your head right,
that you regretted.
You know, we all do this, right?
We all do this.
But the ones that are winning
that you're probably frustrated with,
that probably got the job and you got passed up
or probably won the gold
and maybe you got bronze or came in fourth,
(14:41):
they work harder than you.
They may be more naturally talented
given the gobees of the world, the Oprah's,
the Barack Obama's, you know,
they got a little something extra in the DNA
that gives them an advantage for sure.
But deliberate practice, you can get that good.
You can even be better.
You can even work harder than them.
(15:03):
It's interesting.
Now, the other thing is,
and this is a really important thing.
All those skills don't mean anything
if you can't network and build relationships, right?
You could be the smartest person in the world,
but even Darwin needed a manufacturer
to fund his stuff and put it out, you know.
Nobody would have a light bulb
if you sit in his room and couldn't talk to people
and get some things done.
(15:25):
So, you know, look at like LinkedIn's co-founder,
Reid Hoffman.
You know, his first social networking platform,
social net failed miserably, right?
But he learned from this.
He focused on building meaningful connections
in the business world,
which led him to the success and the creation of LinkedIn.
Right, he realized that success would come
(15:46):
not just from the ideas, but from the relationships.
Now, I, sorry, Reid, but I'm building an app
that's gonna ruin yours, and I love you, brother,
but we're coming for you.
I'll tell y'all more about that later,
but I just acquired 50% of this app that we're rebranding,
but it's called DirectRope now,
(16:06):
and it's way better than LinkedIn.
So, but I'm gonna learn from you.
Damn right, I'm gonna learn from you, Reid Hoffman,
and I'm gonna read all about you and what you've done,
and we're gonna move forward.
So the guy who started Starbucks,
this dude, same thing, right?
Howard Schultz is his name.
(16:27):
He couldn't convince investors to fund his idea
of the coffee house culture, right?
This wasn't just a coffee house, it was culture.
It was, we're gonna take care of our baristas.
They're gonna be bright, cool, neat people
that you wanna talk to, not, what do you want?
Coffee, blank.
No, they were like, hey, what's going on?
How's your day?
(16:47):
We're good.
They got good benefits.
They created a culture around coffee.
Love or hate them.
Seven bucks a coffee is exordinate, my dudes,
but, you know, I'm from Seattle,
so no more power to you, baby.
I know you took the Serena Gorda.
Now, this is the other thing I have a problem with
with Starbucks, if I could sidebar a little bit.
Y'all had Serena Gorda on there, right?
(17:08):
Serena Gorda was not a beauty queen.
It's just Serena Gorda, man, you know what I'm saying?
She's a mermaid, you know, a well-endowed mermaid at that.
But you took her off to make her prettier and smaller.
Why did you do that?
Ain't nothing wrong with Serena Gorda.
(17:28):
You know, make your coffee more approachable.
Come on, guys.
Put Serena Gorda back on that books cop of yours.
You'll see what I'm saying.
Anyway.
So basically, he built a strong relationship-based culture.
They put your name on your cup.
They greet you by your name on the app, right?
(17:50):
You feel like you're a part of a community.
You get to know your Starbucks people, right?
And I know it's all over the place now,
and it seems ridiculous,
but still that coffee culture worked, was built on that.
It's brilliant.
Okay, I'll give you a couple more
then I'm gonna leave you alone.
Continuous feedback.
Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO.
(18:11):
He turned his failures into successes too.
Schmidt recognized early on
that his leadership style needed improvement, okay?
He saw continuous feedback from his team.
How can I be better?
What can I do better?
They helped him involve and steer Google
to be all of these things it is now,
which I won't say that I hail Google.
(18:31):
I use Google all the time.
I know Google is definitely part of the axis of evil.
Sorry, Google, but it's true.
Come on, y'all are everywhere.
Probably in the other room on my Google device,
you're recording everything I'm saying,
and then you're gonna come after me and shadow ban me.
I don't know, whatever.
But the point here is,
(18:54):
Eric Schmidt took valuable advice.
He recognized that he needed help and he asked people,
what am I doing wrong?
How could I be better?
You almost don't even need to ask people.
They're gonna tell you in various ways.
When you say something like, I'm the kind of person
and nobody in the room says anything,
is I'm the kind of person who's really honorable
(19:16):
and always do what I say I'm gonna do
and everybody in the room's quiet.
Guess what?
They don't think you are.
You gotta change that.
All right, when you say things like,
hey, I think I'm the one who should do that
and nobody says anything, there's a reason for it.
Ask them why they think that,
(19:36):
why they don't believe in you in that way.
Those relationships are all you got in life.
If you're not able to better yourself,
you end up killing your own business,
your own efforts, your own public standing,
whatever it is.
You're not valuable to the rest of the world
if you render yourself invaluable
by not fixing your problems.
(19:58):
It's a weakness.
Don't be weak.
Weak isn't being weak.
Weak is not making your deficits a gain, you know what I mean?
Make your weaknesses your strengths.
That's what the best in the world do.
You wanna be the best in the world,
that's what you gotta do.
So another thing is strategic risk taking.
(20:19):
And I wrote the book on this
because my entire life has been taking strategic risks.
And thankfully I had just enough of them pin out
that I've had a life in the entertainment industry
and it's been fantastic.
It's been very difficult and erratic
and up and down and all around
and going from sleeping in my truck
(20:40):
to making extra zeros on things
to mailbox money and beyond.
You know, you really can appreciate taking risks
especially when you win them.
Sucks when you lose them
but gotta keep taking them till you win them.
Consistency, go back to the earlier lessons.
Sarah Blakely.
(21:01):
Now many, many people in the world
would hail Sarah Blakely as a salvation for their lives
because she created Spanx.
Spanx keeps your butt together.
You know what I'm saying?
She's a lady and you got a butt.
You need to kind of firm up.
You put on some Spanx.
Thank you, Sarah Blakely.
(21:23):
So Blakely took a major risk
in investing her entire savings
and developing underpants
that firm up your floppy flapjack ass.
Sorry, I had to say it.
I was kind of fun though, I didn't say that.
Sorry, I never said I was PC, okay?
I never said it.
(21:43):
So despite those early rejections,
see, she used strategy to push it forward
leading this company to a billion dollar valuation
and beyond, right?
Because there's a lot of people
that wanna have a nice looking butt.
She came to find out.
But you know, she did that.
Jeff Bezos, same thing.
(22:03):
Early on, Amazon faced all kinds of problems, right?
It was trying to launch new product lines, web services
but the risks paid off
because taking the strategic risk,
especially when your core brand of Amazon
is selling books,
you went from selling books to selling everything
to selling web services, okay?
(22:24):
Now given, it did pretty well with the book part
so they could take those risks
but strategic risks do pay off
if you're strategic about them, right?
You have to think about that.
Self-reflection and course correction.
Now, as much as Steve Jobs,
everyone loves Steve Jobs,
(22:45):
all the iPhone owners that give me a hard time
about having a droid,
which I just like because the camera's better
and the screen's better
but everybody up and down will swear
that the Apple's better.
I'm like, go look and find out
who actually made that camera
you're talking shit about in your iPhone.
It was the same people that made droid.
(23:06):
Okay, Samsung.
So shut up, iPhone owners.
Anyway, love you iPhone owners
but Steve Jobs, who everyone hails as a hero,
he's a great salesman, not my favorite, okay?
Steve Jobs, which is another reason
I don't really have an iPhone
but I do have Apple everything else
I can't really say too much
(23:27):
but Steve Jobs never gave a dime to charity, you know, never
and he was very mean to his people
and he was actually not a nice fellow
but he made great product
and he was great at selling them
and, you know, Apple was bomb
and his aesthetic was bomb
but so here's the good thing about, you know,
self-reflection and self-correction.
He was ousted from Apple, Jobs was
(23:50):
because he was an asshole, quite frankly
but he took time to reflect
and eventually relaunched successful ventures
like Pixar, Next, his return to Apple
was after he had learned his lesson, right?
And then he launched the iPhone and everything else
because you need people, you need people to support you
(24:11):
don't matter how visionary you are, right, Kanye?
Because sometimes you can say shit
that eventually pisses people off beyond repair
and eventually things catch up with you, right, Diddy?
Sorry, had to say it.
I always knew that dude was tough.
But moving on.
(24:33):
Uh, if you make your failures, your successes
and you understand that sometimes you have to step back,
lick your wounds and reassess your path
to get forward in anything, no matter how big you are
Steve Jobs got fired by Apple, fired.
(24:56):
Bye bye, you're fired.
Clean out your desk, Steve Jobs
and walk out of our spaceship.
He went back to the drawing board.
He thought about it.
He made himself better.
I don't know how.
Did he de-assolify himself?
I'm not sure.
And then he went back to Apple
(25:17):
and he did great things for Apple
that all you people will tell me all about
every time I see your iPhone when I pull my droid out.
Anyway, this is Dylan Barry.
This is why it matters.
And why does all this matter?
It matters because we all wanna get better and do better.
And some of you are convincing yourselves
that you're doing that and you're not.
And you know you're not.
(25:38):
Because you're not being consistent.
You're not reading more.
You're not writing everything down.
You're not putting in 2000 words a day.
You're not.
And if you wanna be great and you're not,
don't bitch about not being great.
Get to work, do what it takes to be great.
Do what it takes to be great.
(25:58):
Okay?
This is Dylan Barry.
Why it matters.
Make yourself better.
You got it.
I got it.
We got it.
We all in this mess together.
I'll talk to y'all later.
Big love.
And that's my point, Kev.
I'm out.
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