Brainstorming $100M AI-Proof Businesses

think the theme of this episode today is basically anti digital anti tech anti ai ideas i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never i have an idea you by the way what alright so hampton you've got this community of ceos in different cities and it's great and you're doing great and it's mostly a it started off online i'm so glad you shifted to like in person which sure was hard but like painful but but necessary change i've just been thinking about some of these like ai proof ideas i think it's just an interesting lens to be like what doesn't really make sense for ai to like improve or or disrupt and we joined a country club and wait wait wait wait i thought i could just keep the all on i just keep kelly i didn't think the tsa agent would would ask me for for my basketball there who's we you like you and your wife your family or like okay you and your wife like a golf like a golf cup a golf country club even though i don't play golf currently okay like the the stereotype of my head of like a golf course and like chicken tenders i think it's a lot of that there's a great pool okay it's great amenities tennis corn pickle a ball etcetera okay look i don't wanna talk you what country them one i'm trying to say from a business perspective i'm pretty fast you have to interview did you have to interview did go have the interview scheduled in a few days yeah oh my god the the hardest part by the way because there's a dress code oh it's under armour on it are you allowed to wear i was like okay i get full tank but i have about a muscle tank you guys get to that that's actually how i showed up for the for the first tour by anyways yeah i'm little fish out of wall what are they gonna ask you about the interview i think you're like are you gonna you should you catch can't tell them you jose podcast called my first million i it's so fantastic honest i reject you don't be honest what are you insane do you have to lie look my wife really did she knows a lot a lot of the moms from the school go there whatever alright so yeah let me get to my point here yes yes to everything you're thinking insane alright i just agree let's just agree on all of those things that are i ever thought in your head right now how much is it gonna cost what's your monthly what's the when membership fees are something like you pay seventy five hundred dollars so seven thousand five hundred dollars just to like initiate just to like get your foot in the door okay that's not even the dues that's like an app well there's a five hundred dollar application fee then it's like a seven seven thousand five hundred dollar like in initial join the club fee and then you pay something like i don't know seven hundred to a thousand dollars a month as a member and that's to not even get to play golf that's like p member but you don't get to play golf if you play tennis you gotta like use left hand or something i don't know it's not you don't even get everything so we're joining as like the basic member but i was looking at the numbers i was like okay so they're basically probably close to two thousand members at this club and so two thousand members times let's call it ten grand a year average membership fee which again it doesn't even include the golf is a twenty million dollar annual recurring revenue business to then have the right to go pay for food darren drinks to just have the right to go shop there and so everything else i think mostly operates breakeven i think they do events like weddings and and and birthday parties and stuff like that that makes some money too but i'm pretty sure this country club is pulling in something like twenty to twenty five million a year in recurring revenue not including the all of the like you know whatever margin they have on food beverage golf etcetera which might be closer to like ten percent or something and i just thought man this is incredible business and i've seen a few of these doubts so i saw that one when i first moved to san francisco the guy i was working with michael birch he created the battery in san francisco which i was like san francisco didn't have a soho house so he created the battery and was that good was that a good business well i think he under charges dramatically know he didn't need the money per s you know he sold his company for like eight hundred million dollars so you he wasn't doing it for the he doing it for the social and i think he didn't wanna like make it like a only rich tech guy thing so he priced it initially like twenty five hundred dollars a year like two hundred bucks a month like that's literally less than e or something you know now i think it's three thousand dollars this is a pretty pretty low still one time i went there i think with you and i'm not exaggerating i this is the the this i swear to god this is the truth there was a booth it's that had a pretty blonde hair lady snoop dogg and a monk wearing an orange like shaw sitting at the same booth like it looked like the dolly lam snoop dogg and a hop and they and they were like sitting like this like leaning in having a conversation i don't know what it was about but it it could've have been like a world peace but it was i that it it was crazy i saw that in real life and i was like this is the craziest thing i've ever seen yeah it's crazy i are i've seen elon there see jay z there it's crazy so i saw that that that model and so house i know if you saw i just went private private equity group just came in and basically took a private at two point seven billion and they think that in twenty twenty five it'll do something like a hundred fifty million of eb but it's a little confusing to said not profitable currently but the twenty twenty five forecast is a hundred is a you know like a hundred and fifty million dollars in and so i started thinking about these clubs and i was like why doesn't sam do get into this business with hampton right like why not in your core one two three cities get some real estate create a physical space and top up on the members and then anytime a member traveling to new york la chicago whatever austin wherever you wanna put your wherever your hubs are they have a physical place to go work to eat to me to do whatever so i have an answer so for for one it's operationally i think that it's silly for me to my main business is creating wonderful core groups for people talk and then this business that you are talking about is hospitality in real estate i think the answer is there's a world where we will do it but it needs to be its own business you you you shouldn't mix them so a company i was inspired by called chief it's it's what we're doing but mainly for women executives they had a lot of real estate and it dragged down it dragged them down significantly but let me tell you something so there's this weird surge going on particularly in new york where there's this and over the last year or so there's been something like fifteen or twenty new social clubs or c working spaces that have popped up and so have you heard of like zero bond yeah so that's an example of one and there are so many of these social clubs amongst like young like like twenty something gen z this is a phenomenon that is just absolutely killing it and it's not new social clubs have been around for forever so since the gil at age people have been doing like social clubs since it's been franklin doing jun where he would like meet up with his friends but what i'm noticing is that there's a whole niche of c working spaces that combine this social club kind of aesthetic so look let me give you a few examples google the mall in so it's the word the and then m a l i n before i had my office here i rented a space here and this is like a very niche c working space absolutely beautiful on the inside with three locations and whenever i was there it was like buzzing and like the the target demographic for these guys are like good looking freelancers like like everyone who worked there was like a hot freelancer like good news and bad news good news we liked to share a freelance designer bad news is just one other requirement yeah i didn't fit the ic but they still let me in but like they let just see why been why you don't belong yeah they let me hang out there's another guy in my core group his name's james street so go to this website called the lighthouse dot com so the lighthouse dot com my friend owns this agency called whale and it's a huge nine figure year digital agency and it's based in la a so it's like all hip and cool and everything and they created a little project called the lighthouse so the lighthouse dot com and it's i think they call a creators campus in other words it's basically a c working space for creators yeah meaning instead of like just normal desk they have like cool studios it's kinda like the one i'm recording and like someone can just like record and in the first year of business they've done eight figures in revenue with one location and i'm seeing this pop up like over and over and over and then another one is new house have you heard of new house no go click new house and tell and so they they call themselves the work and social home for creative and so these guys are selling everyone that i've just named they're basically just taking a sliver of what like we work is and who it's for and then what you're talking about of social clothes and they're combining it because scaling cool is very challenging that's what soho struggled with you can't scale x sensitivity really well unless you own a variety of brands like you're louis vuitton and you own like hermes and louis vuitton and this and that and so each one it's okay if they're like don't grow aggressively but scaling utility works wonderfully and that's where positioning it as a c working space works really well but in new york in particular but i'm seeing this in in a lot of other places these social club slash c working spaces are thriving and we were told that we work in all these other businesses like that are kinda silly they're not the economics can be great it's not gonna be like right an eighty billion dollar company or whatever we we work raised at but it could still be an amazing company alright so a lot of people will talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start a business nonsense if you listen to at least one episode on this podcast you know that it's completely not true my last company the hustle we grew it through something like seventeen dollars or eighteen million dollars in revenue i started it with like three hundred dollars my current company hampton does over ten million dollars in revenue started it with actually no money maybe twenty nine dollars or something like that nothing and so you don't actually need investors to start a company you don't need a fancy business plan but what you do need is systems that actually work and so my old company the hustle they put together five proven business models that you could start right now today with under a thousand dollars these are models that if you do it correctly it can make money this week you can get it right now you can scan the qr code or click the link in the description now back to the show there's two other interesting ones i wanna show you one is slightly related so what one is a soho house for families with kids so i think it's called beginning club house dude it's in it's in it's in new york right yep dumb where what what is dumb is that brooklyn yeah brooklyn it's like this is where like yu parents who wear car heart exactly so they're opening this up there which is a soho house but that's kid friendly because you know all these private clubs tend to be only for like sort of like either single you know young people or like people whose kids are grown up and this it's like a you know family's not welcome but as somebody with like you know four or five year old kids my entire life base and the reason we got you know our membership for this thing is like we just need a place to take kids as like a reliable spot where they're gonna have some fun and i can like have them fence in you know what i mean like they they can they have some stuff to i i can just chill and like take care of you know whatever oh you need food we have food you wanna swim we get swim you know like you wanna just chill you gonna play some games we could do that too like whatever whatever you need so i thought this kinda interesting the other one i thought was interesting the guy who started wag dot com has a new business have you seen this he's starting this new thing in denver that and when i first heard it i kinda laughed i think his name is jason metz he's basically building multi family housing so just like a place to rent to live but it's called like i figure i was called like live pet play here's something live pet work and basically it's like what he realized was you know in denver there's more pet owners than than parents with kids and he's like they're and i think this is true nationwide i believe that there's more people with pets than there are people with kids and for those people housing often is like very limited so like a lot of places don't let you have a pet if they do have a pet it's like this inconvenience where like nothing about it is built for life as a pet owner in a city whereas what these guys are doing are they're like cool you know dog grooming you know you basically you rent your plate or you rent your unit it's like the unit has like a doggy door there's like grass areas at the bottom and on the rooftop to take your your dog out there's dog walkers in the building so you get like you know twenty dog walks a month you get two two nights of dog sitting and targeting specifically this lights sort demographic of person i thought that's pretty interesting it's basically like take normal multi multi family but how do you charge like an extra thirty to forty percent of rent every month well if you make it like a plus for somebody who's like dog obsessed and you know dog owners you see i think they spend something like six six thousand dollars a year just on their pet alone and the inconvenience of living in a place that's like not pet friendly is a daily you know a daily nuisance so i think there might be actually be something to this that's interesting because all all real estate is just a question of can you buy it where everybody thinks it's worth x right you buy it because everybody thinks it's gonna generate x dollars of net income but you know you can you can do one point three x or one point two x and if you do that you know and you buy a twenty million dollar building you've increased the value of the building maybe by ten million dollars or twelve million dollars if you're able to do that well and so i just think this was smart us normally the way they do these value ads is you have to build more units it's like that's how you're gonna generate more income because i'm gonna have to spend a much money you build more units this was like no i'm just gonna like position it as being great for this type of customer and i know that that type of customer is willing to pay a little more for these additional perks and services and spaces how much one did they this guy raise i saw he's raising for the building itself not for like the head like it's a real estate play right so he's like we're buying this building already it generates this we're gonna add these things and then it's gonna you know it'll generate this when when once we have rented we we have confidence gonna be rented because you know here's all the demographic trends in our favor i always get nervous when tech people go into real estate that that always freaks me out i tried to do the same by the way i had an internet company and i tried to like i i tip toe to it and i and i bought some real estate and i just wanna like i could put this on the record my hit rate for anything that i've done on my own real estate wise it's i'm over for three i have lost money on every single one of them yeah well operating yourself is is always different right like you you tried to beat the real estate developer right you tried to do the execute project plan yourself and so you're just at the beginning of the learning curve like i i've probably at the last twelve months my best investment across everything and i you know like i mean all the ai stocks and all that my best investment by far has been my real estate investment but i'm not the one off yes investing in other people i'm saying like when i'm just an investor and someone else's work it's been wonderful i i agree that is wonderful anytime that i have tried to operate it o for three i've lost in every single one of them and at every single time i think what am i doing yeah i can make a website for zero dollars and i can make money more money than i've just made off of investing seven figures and having to work really hard and stress over making significantly less or no money yeah have you seen any other of these like social clubs that interests you no but i just think it's gonna be more more popular like all of the trends seem to play in this favor right so it's like if you have remote work which was like pretty niche before then it became everybody and now it it said some new normal but it's still way bigger than it was before so you have remote work you have ai that's disrupting other types of businesses you have like generational declines in like number of young men dating number of people who are like married number of virgins you know people with social anxiety and depression like all of those numbers are just like going in the wrong direction and so things like whether it's run clubs or social clubs like it just seems like the core desires they tap into are not being met and like those problems are are being really like i'm not surprised at some of the examples you had in some of the numbers like i think it's really impressive but i'm not entirely surprised because i think people do need this now if i'm a young person listening to this and i wanted to get into this i've been playing around with like copywriting and an idea for this it just doesn't work for hampton it's a little too aggressive but i was reading this book called bowling alone and it's all about in america up until roughly the sixties the average america american was a member of a variety of clubs like their pt rotary club which most of the don't even know what that is don't know what that is i've but i've heard it like the elk club like all these clubs that like we've heard the name but we're not entirely sure what they were the average american was part of like one point eight of them voter turnout for the kennedy election was an all time high i think it was like seventy eight percent and the trust that the average american had in a random other american was also at an all time high and since then there's been the slow decline where club affiliation is really low pt is a is a good like kinda litmus test that it has very low participation voter turnout is low and the the amount that we trust one another is low and there's all types of hypothesis as to why this is the case one strong hypothesis is the suburbs so when you are out in the suburbs where or you don't live in an urban environment you have less interaction with your neighbor and you don't really get to know them as much and it's a little bit more like this is my land this is my territory everyone else stay out and let me worry about me that type of energy versus if you live in a building or an urban environment you sort of kind of have to understand we're in this together right and that's one of the theories and i was thinking if i was wanting to start a club in this space my tagline would be join or die and this idea that as ai and digital gets more popular you a young person crave human and interaction more than ever and that you will literally live longer if you have a community of other people who interact with on a regular basis right and so i've i was thinking that like this line joiner or die has sat been sitting with me for like three or four weeks where you can do all types of campaigns around this idea of like you owe it to yourself to be part of a community and you have to get out from behind the screen and i think that like the average twenty two year old is yearning for this so badly i have a few notes on your tagline but we'll do that offline you're not a fan of joy her die didn't do it for me but i'm sure there's others who will like it do just imagine like some like pretty lady named kale who's like serving chicken tenders and she likes serves and says thanks sean enjoy your tenders and fries join her die twitter to it's a greeting well i think brian johnson got don't die you're you're almost infringing there so look gotta be a little careful hey let's take quick break you know hubspot help tumblr solve a big problem tumblr needed to move fast they were trying to produce trending content but their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign but now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds and the result was huge three times more engagement and double the content creation if you wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com alright back to the show okay i have another idea that's i think the theme of this episode today is basically anti digital anti tech anti ai ideas okay and so here's another one that our friend t was tweeting about you see this thing that he was tweeting about y no what's the y alright to check this out have you ever been to a like maybe a stand up comedy show or a music festival yeah and they put your phone into a pouch yeah c our buddy he used to date a girl like ten years ago who worked at this company do you remember this i actually like told us all about this company and i was like that's the stupidest thing i've ever heard of and now it's you you're crushing so according to trump which i couldn't verify elsewhere put into trunk basically like three hundred million this year in revenue just putting people's phones and vouchers and you know is this great example of one of my frameworks which is like anytime the pendulum swings too far in one direction it creates the demand for the opposite right like you know newton's physics it's like you know every force or whatever has like an equal every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction so it's like every trend creates an equal and opposite trend and i think as we all have just become completely addicted to our phones you know six to eight hours a day of screen time i don't know how many times i open my phone but it's gotta be like you know three hundred plus times a day or something something just really embarrassing this has become a huge business i started off so the story here is this guy started this in san francisco and he's a former soccer player and i guess the way the story goes is which you never know what these start up origin stories how much was made up but he was out of music festival and somebody was taking pictures of somebody else who was intoxicated having a good time but like you know share without their consent or whatever and he was just like man it's like messed up there's just like phones everywhere now and he's like we should be able to go to a concert like this and feel like you know be present feel free blah blah blah so he goes to his like in a lab he starts start sewing he thinks about like should i do lockers should i do you know bags and he comes up with this idea of a magnetic pouch so it's a small pouch about the size of a phone and it can only be un has a magnet seal and it okay can only be unlocked by this like base you know you have to tap it on the base to get the thing off it's sort like when you shop at a store and they have like anti theft thing on it and the the cashier ass still take that off so you don't i you know spray yourself with the ink or whatever it's basically that for phones and he starts hustling it and he's like alright who needs this the most he's trying to do music festival he's go on door to door and in san francisco and then he finds out that dave chappell has been talking about how he just hates that people are like you know on their phone and recording his his sets where he's working out material and his business is to have the specials but the whole thing would get leaked on youtube and so he asked a comedy booker in in san francisco he's like can you connect me with dave's team and he goes and he demos it to dave and dave's was like i'll try this he tries it at one show he loves it people are way more present they're not on their phones and his stuff doesn't get leaked so dave starts choosing other which huge that was a huge deal i remember when that happened in san francisco dave chappell is get making everyone lock their phones in a back yeah sounds like got a lot of friends and it sounds extreme yeah and anytime an idea sounds extreme it's what seth good and call remarkable meaning worth remark it's a unusual thing and so it continues to grow there but that was gonna be a small business right because a comedy many stand comedy shows are there how much many how much these comedian even make okay can you charge and then the big break came with schools and now seventy percent of their revenue comes from schools so like a minnesota school district pays five hundred thousand dollars to get these for all the schools so that schools become a cell phone free zone where students come they they have to lock up their phone to enter or leave it in their car and then you know now they're focused during the day now they don't have that distraction they don't i text each other that i'm boarding class doing that stuff and the stats bear this out where like kids are happier their grades go up and the teachers are happier they have a better environment and so they started doing this you know schools all around the world and so isn't this crazy that this little business putting your cell phone at a pouch is now this three hundred million dollar juggernaut like how cool is that it's for for for one like i i would have i would have thought this would never in a million years work now it seems obvious but back then i like it's one of these ideas where it's dude maybe you should go get a job and like now enough around with like sewing these bags two have you used one yeah because at comedy shows they always make us do it i hate it but you know what what emotion do you feel rage and anxiety rage and anxiety came it to my phone reap like i remember one time when my wife was pregnant i went to a dave chappell health show and the lady handed me one and i was like look lady my wife's is like three weeks pregnant i'm not giving you my phone and i tried to hide it and speak and she me down and she goes here we five dude or sorry three weeks away from from giving birth and i was like i'm not i have to have my phone and she goes and she turns sideways she goes yeah me too and she was super pregnant and she was like and she was really pregnant the lady work at the couch she goes i'm pregnant too put the phone in the bag and i was like i was like yes ma'am but yes ma'am but i felt extreme anxiety which which means i need to use it more than i thought yeah exactly i in in my school district where i was living before they were gonna they the board i was paying attention they were gonna vote whether they should use this and you wanna know something crazy it lost most parents wanted of their kids to have their first right yeah yeah there's like a argument of about whether it's safety or like personal property there's arguments against it but i i mean it seems like the market reaction is that it's working overall of obviously yeah and i just think it's such a such a simple idea also i was watching something the other day and ed sheeran was like i haven't had a phone for five years isn't that crazy he was like what does that mean he was just like i don't own a phone he's was like when i had a phone people was just like calling me or texting me all the time i was just using social media all the time he's like it was really hard to like make music so i just got rid in my phone he's was like if someone needs to reach me you know i have a manager that'll will find me if you really gotta get to me but i haven't had a phone of five years i was like wow that might be like you know what when you really read like david gag is like pull up record i thought like the edge sheeran and not having a phone for five years it's like up there with any sort of like ultra race or or pull up record can i propose an m okay m challenge oh shit yeah listen last summer we did what do we call it what do we do that my first half summer bad my first muscle i have to think of a of a of a good name for this but the challenge is we're gonna we got it we saturday or sunday or just one week we could do it you have to go on a twelve hour walk and you can't bring your phone or have a conversation with someone twenty four hours twenty four hour phone fast no a twelve hour twelve dude i'm these things dude i promise you it's not easy i would bet so much walk far go you you have to be outside of the house and your phone has to be in your bedroom or whatever and you can't be with your wife you gotta be by yourself you have to be by yourself you can't have a conversation you can't talk to a stranger you just have to be outside by yourself walking around wherever you live it doesn't matter just go sit in a park but you have to be by yourself for twelve hours i would bet my life that you can't do that i'm not trying to kill you doug but i think i could do that i don't think you could i i i you had cheat yeah there's one hundred percent i believe with dude you cannot go and just walk around and not have a conversation with someone without your phone for you don't understand my kids are on my phone at least half the day because i use it to like s them and like subdue them like a tranquil dark so my kids are already on my phone all the time i don't have my phone with me most of the time but i a challenge accepted i think we should do this the phone fast it's i think i mean twelve hours just sounds like child's child's me but i you i i you can have a conversation so you can oh you by the way you can't use your like laptop no screen yeah you no device and no conversation you gotta be you gotta be by yourself so another as i'm scrolling tiktok later at night i see this other video of this guy who knows he went six weeks i think without looking at a screen so no computer no tv no phone six weeks this guy did and he he was you know normally you'd be like what do people say they're just like oh i felt so much better or present you're like yeah yeah yeah i know i know know but whatever this guy one other interesting thing which he goes i tested my memory before and after and he goes i was fiftieth percentile roughly in memory memo i'm now ninety ninth percentile he goes and i it's not like a i practiced memory he's like i was just like not looking at not distracted all the time and i've blur to be more present and now my memory is ninety ninth percentile i had a i had to write a bunch of copy and so like basically from like after dinner so like nine pm to like midnight i basically like you put your headphones on you plug in you just have to like write and get the work done and it's a really fun way to get in the flow and i hadn't done that in years and it is incredible how hard it is to focus when's was the last time that you focus and you shut out all the distractions you turn off slack you turn off this it's really really really rare that i do that earlier rare and when i was in college i would do that every single night and it was awesome like that's when i would do my homework or like my paper writing whatever like from you know monday to thursday like eight pm to one am that was like work time and it was a very rewarding experience to do it what was the what was the gpa dude i swear to god i graduated college with a four point o did really i got a d in entrepreneurship class because i missed like a presentation but i got i got virtually a's in one hundred percent of everything i took that's all serious that's amazing in high school i yeah i worked really i went to a bad school i went to belmont university val like you never already even heard of that but in high school i graduated with a two point three and then when i got to college i was like i'm gonna take this seriously and my nighttime work sessions were holy for me it was like i felt i it felt marvelous and i never experienced that anymore do you ever experience that that absolute focus phone focus yes so what i started doing and i would say my hit rate right now is maybe one out of every three days i do this legit like totally legit which is i wake up and i do it first thing in the morning so i go no input so i don't look at my phone i don't open up my computer i grab a pencil on a pad and i'll do one of two things either i go for a walk first so i'll take if my dog like up i'll take my dog for a walk and come back and then do this or i'll just sit at this chair over here in this room and i just write my it's like morning pages right like and so i'll try to create something pre input and i'll do different things so it doesn't matter what i create what i write it's yeah know i stole this from tim ferris you told me something about like said something like a creative gym session just like the way you'll go to the gym and like if i go to the gym i don't use my phone most of the time like i'm off my phone for the majority of it and you're just doing something for an hour right doing that at at a creative level and so i've done it where i write jokes like because i learned this this how seinfeld started his day for forty five years and so i was like okay did that i'll sometimes just write my food plan for the today like what am gonna eat when am i gonna work out just kinda get that make that front center sometimes i'll write like a blog post or i'll just write you know stuff that i'm like thinking about like little loose ends about each of the businesses about like oh you know i should probably do that or you know what we're being stupid about the way we're doing this or you know wait this is working we're not doubling down on that what i need to have a conversation right and so i'll i'll try to do that but the biggest thing for me isn't just the focus it's being pre input to any slack twitter whatever email nothing text what what time in the morning it usually starts at seven now that school came back on i go at eight and do a drop off and then like ride my bike drop them off come back so that's you that's kind of cut it now where it's like basically only one hour instead of the ninety minutes yeah i think we should do the m challenge needs to either be the walk thing or morning pages i think that's quite helpful alright so in the youtube comments settle the debate twelve hours or twenty four just write twelve or twenty four of a no phone a phone fast just like people do juice cleanse they they do others other you know like silent meditation retreats whatever ours is just a phone fast and then sam has this requirement that somewhere in that window you gotta go be by yourself what's what's the the famous quote like yeah all of your problems all of man's problems are because he can't sit in a room by himself for thirty minutes that's what i'm suggesting but twelve hours who who's name it after them i don't know abel lincoln pascal this is the new pascal wage bla pascal on this so the new pascal wage is can you do this i think just sitting for thirty minutes though and writing on with pen with a pen and paper is probably even more beneficial i think that like you have mentioned wanting to write a book and in my head i'm like man running a book that would require like three hours a day of just not talking to anyone and being zoned out that is what is that is what is holding me or i mean i don't wanna write a book but like if i were to write a book that is what's holding me back is not in a good idea not can i write it's but that requires three hours day of silent right and i think that that's pretty messed up that that is the reason why people can't do their best work i met up with tim urban in austin and you know big fan of his blog and he was writing a book at the time and i was asking and he goes he's made it sound so simple goes all i do he he said the same thing i wake up and for two hours all i do is right i don't need a perfect day i don't need eight hours a day he goes i need two hours that's it and in those two hours i might write two paragraphs two sentences or two me pages but if i just do that every single day for the year it just stacks right then you do that for three hundred straight days you've written a six hundred page book and he's like i can just sit down and right the equivalent of two pages right it's not even like a know like a book page is even smaller than like a you know google doc page and he's like two hours like if you don't have two hours like then you're not serious about this and that that really stuck me so i started that's you know part of the inspirational running my company hampton it gives me the chance to meet with hundreds of different businesses and i'm always surprised by how many of them still use spreadsheets emails and clunky tools that do not talk to each other it's like watching someone build a house with duct tape so here's my take custom software that actually fits your 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sam sent do you know who robert carr is yeah what did he write so robert carr i think he originally was a journalist and then his first big piece of writing was a three book series on lyndon johnson the president after jfk and each book was like eight hundred pages but then his big world famous bit of writing was called the power broker and it was on a new york politician called robert moses and obama has since written like the forward for the most recent addition of the power broker just to give an idea of how influential this book is many people regard the power broker as the greatest biography of all time it doesn't matter if you're interested in robert moses the guy or not the fact that this man packed every single sentence with like the best research for like i think it's fourteen hundred pages that's it's like it's like a modern marvel that's what like that's like the clout of this book and he did like a funny things like he would go to like if he's writing about a location he would go there and count the amount of people coming in and out of the location so when he wrote about it he'd be like fifty eight people came that day you know like he was it's like very specific but anyway there's a museum exhibit that i went to this past weekend where it was a whole exhibit written about or or on robert arrow writing the book the power broker and one of the main parts of the the exhibit was his process for writing and what he said that he did was he had you know how like a lot of our parents or teachers used to have a desk calendar where it's a big calendar where it has all thirty days on a piece of paper and so his goal was he goes all i need to do is write one thousand words every single day they don't have to be good words they can i can throw them away but what i have to do no matter what and write to write this book over the next three years one thousand words every single day and i will achieve my mission and they have the original notepad his like calendar in the museum exhibit and he writes on it he says twelve hundred forty three words today thirteen hundred this many word and he writes it and you see a big x exon it right and when he it's like an x on the on the block and then how many words and they they showed august and it was like he missed one because he was like had flu or something like that but it was like it looked like a chain of like you know x's but i think jerry seinfeld the one's referenced and it was incredibly inspiring that greatness this book being the great thing which it's one of the best biographies i've ever read but greatness comes from my very simple process of one thousand words every single day of course he's a genius and there's all this amazing amazing stuff but that was probably the cornerstone of actually going from idea to a great work with sticking to that thousand words per day and that is a very attainable thing it's hard to do but that is a very bite sized way of looking at an epic project it was which i found very inspirational i love that there's a another great one that is is like that have you heard the steve martin ban jo story no what's that okay so the steve mark band he crush he crush the bit this says steve martin tells the story i got like a coach or a teacher or tutor and the teacher or tutor was sort of like honest with him and was like yeah you don't have like a ton of natural bench of talent just so you know right like he was pretty frustrated with his progress and what he did was he's zoomed out and i just thought this like so such a powerful simple mental trick where he just goes alright look i suck today and i'm probably gonna suck tomorrow i'm probably gonna suck for the next three months at six months or whatever he goes but here's the thing i really wanna play the ban joe he goes what if instead i just committed to playing the ban for forty years because if you anybody who plays the ban for forty years you can't suck and it just took all the pressure of being good off his shoulders and let him just be like yeah i'm just committed i'm just gonna do this for forty years and of i'll get good no like you know then i don't have to have these like daily doubts or questions or hesitation or moments where i wanna you know give up because i reset my expectations and i love that story and by the way he like wins a grammy for a song where he he's playing the manager like you know five or seven years later so you and like obviously he worked out really well but i love that kind of forty year mindset because it applies to basically everything like i felt this with like diet or fitness it's like easy to get frustrated off you know i was doing well then i sort of traveled and fell off the wagon for two days or whatever and it's like two two zoom outs have helped me i was like look it took me thirty seven years to get in this shape like it's okay if it takes a couple for me to fix it know what i like it's alright and then the zoom out being like instead of just doubting like can i do it will it happens it's like so i'm just gonna keep trying this for the next decade do i really think it's not gonna happen if i just keep like giving this by all for a decade like no course it's gonna happen the course i'm gonna fix all these habits i'm gonna get this good workout routine i'm gonna do all the things that i know i need to do and i think it's very helpful because most people will quit early but they don't quit early because they're weak they're quit early because they're beating themselves up and they have the wrong expectation of how long something takes or how easy it'll be or how like you know whether they deserve it or not whether it it'll happen for them or not right like if you knew it was gonna happen when your uber says it's nine minutes away you don't get panicked that it's nine minutes away you just sort of accept that as nine minutes away you see it coming towards you versus if you're doing some project and you have no idea if it is it even is gonna happen right like then every day you have this sort of i interim am i out doubts i think that like there's like a list of people so this is like business show so we talk about business and money a lot but there's like a list of people who i learn more from that have nothing to do with any of that and i think like a steve martin type is one of those people i think that when when i hear that story so like i have a a few like bad habits which are strength and weaknesses one of them being i put time limits on goals so i have a milestone for where i wanna be like every five years and that helps me stay focused but also i feel immense pressure of like i have to hurry up and i gotta get it and so it's cool to hear a story like this of something where you're like you change the frame to where i'm gonna do this down for forty years instead of five because if you do something for five years that like change i could break five years down quarterly and then if i could break it down quarterly i could break down monthly if i could break down monthly then i break it down daily and that is where both structure and anxiety comes into play well i think i i used to be like well which one is because i know the deadlines and the time rates help me but i know they also feel bad and i know when i go over them or i don't have the results in time feels bad man what do i do and then then neville quote kinda cleared it up for me which is in patients with action patients with results so the forty year story isn't i want this to take forty years and i'm gonna spread my workout over forty years it's the result is inevitable over a forty your span now the day to day actions i'm gonna be quite impatient about i'm not gonna let myself be super patient about taking steps and moving forward and trying you know so you have to be able to hold both those polar ideas in your head at the same time and this is so common almost everything you have in life like all the sort of best things come when you have to hold two truths that are polar opposites in your head at the same time and so i i think this is one of them i think i i think i heard you say that on a podcast recently i learned that from joe long i everybody he calls it like dialect or something like atlanta and maybe that's like sci but that not a little too i think that is that sounds a little too philosophical like a philosophy class stuff for me but i think i'd prefer the sean away let me let me read this you because i i learned this when i was researching for joe's podcast so he goes i'm not by any means of philosopher but i've worked worked through some talented people who who you know are in that discipline there's an idea of opposing truths at extremes it's a powerful concept that i've learned to appreciate it by twenties so he goes my personality sometimes called a little intense and when i spend a lot of time reading discussing or thinking about an area i'll often appreciate why a strong viewpoint is true it come to very firm conclusions then later i'm exposed to an opposite strong view and i find this counter view also very persuasive and i found this confusing how could both extreme contradictory review viewpoints to be true and then this great thinker g w f hi said truth exists at different extremes and the actual truth is complex interaction between the two so like you know it he goes most people are sloppy thinkers and opt for a middle of the road when they're face the two two opposing extremes that compromise is less accurate than if you just picked one of the extreme polls that were that were quite persuasive but the wisest stance will incorporate both of the opposites within itself do you have an example of like of like two opposites that you you tend to buy into the example we just gave of like patients versus imp like oh it served me so well to be impatient and like i don't know any successful people that consider themselves super patient but then at the same time you go talk to those people and they're like yeah i was working on this for nine years before we you know had a breakthrough it's like damn these people take pretty long term time horizons also so how is it true how can they be impatient and have a very long term time horizon it's because both things are true just in slightly different ways what's another example yeah i've got a couple of them one of them is capitalism so like i'm super pro capitalism like i love making money i think building businesses is great i think kinda a little bit everyone on their own is awesome and then other times in my private life i'm like i wanna be like a socialist i just wanna share with everyone like i feel bad that my i don't want my cleaning lady to ever wanna go without i wanna make sure that she is paid above and beyond even if it's not with the market demands and i get angry at capitalism and i i feel like this kind of like this polar like one i'm like so pro capitalism and two it's like man i just want everyone to like get paid more than they do and to to be wealthy in those but you can't have both of those we ever experienced that yeah yeah totally you know you have the the sort of head in the heart and you know differences in that in that way another another one that he gives us an example that that's true for me is like the difference between depth and width so it's like do you be a generalist and you're able to like kinda go pretty broad or do you go for depth you know and it's like well there's no one answer and there's obviously virtue to either path and you wanna do both but you can't do both at the same time it wouldn't be like it wouldn't be true you wouldn't be really sort of define physics if you're gonna try to do that do both those at the same time and so you could see the value in either end of the extreme what you probably don't wanna do is the middle where you only have a handful of subjects and you're not very deep in any of them here's one that i think you probably struggle with as well i struggle with us all the time which is creating legacy so like if i go to a museum and i see someone's name on the museum like wall or someone who has a business that's lasted for two hundred years i think i want that legacy i wanna do something great that everyone knows my name and on the other end nothing matters you're gonna die you'll be forgotten and like i would say fifty percent of the time i think this is all irrelevant all that's matters that is that i hang out with my children and it's spend time with them because i've gonna die very soon and no one will remember me on the other end create something that matters do something that's great you know what like do you feel that way i think every entrepreneur by the way even no matter how successful they are even like the billionaires we've had on i bet a nice chunk at the time they think at this like i'm at right also it's like if you go down that road and you're like alright you know either none of it matters or this matters the most you you get you're sort you're the most persuasive person you know and so you know exactly how to convince yourself of either one of those arguments at the time that it justifies doing whatever it is that you wanna do you know so you can't trust yourself in that way either yeah it's like being hungry at the grocery field it's like well i'm feeling down today therefore nothing conversation therefore i've got let it right exactly but like that that is like the dichotomy that i face probably the i i i am i am more often than not on more often than not do i feel uncertainty around those two that i do feel certainty by the way can i also just give you some props i think you're robert carr museum visit that you did your you know these these clubs these housing things did you you have a crazy bag of knowledge and interest that's just like really insane to me like that's really i don't know inspiring and interesting like i just can't believe i don't know what is your filter for what you get like interested in but the result of it fa me you know which is why we've been able to do whatever seven hundred episodes in the podcast well and by the way it the the props advice go both ways when i hear like you tell story i'm like how you know this can but basically when it comes down like i i i i tend to find something that interests me and then i'll create a semester around it so where i'm like this interests me i'm gonna follow my nose and i will like pretty systematically read about it from like nine to ten and i just follow what interests me right now i'm oddly interested in like beauty and art and so i can give you an example i i live in new york city now on the upper west side and i purposely moved into a building from the gil age because that's my favorite era and my neighborhood is it's very weird that there's a little bit of the ti coming out but i am in awe of all these buildings that were built between like eighteen ninety five and nineteen twenty and so i have been using chat gb and i've been going from building to building to building like i'll just walk around at night and like learn about the building and asked the doorman man i'm like tell me everything about this building i wanna know all about the architecture i find it so fascinating and the other day i started watching this guy come gonna say this in a crude way and if he makes it to i just wanna say guy i'm sorry but i i'm gonna say it this way but do you know the indian guy from mean girls his name's raj do you remember that maybe yeah i kind of yeah first of all i wanna say i'm a huge fan of his i'm only saying in a crude way because this is how what most people were yeah the wraps the rapper guy yeah yes as james g so r a j i he has a youtube channel right now that i love he's basically like bob ross but he's been talking about pottery and calligraphy and like kind of beautiful things things that don't typically do well on youtube things that are really fast or the opposite of fast so it's not fast paced it's very slow and he's been talking about architecture now that's like one of his latest things buildings and i realized in one of the videos that he lives down the street from where i now live and last week or on sunday i was at a coffee shop and i saw him and i go hey are you raj received i just wanna let you know i love your youtube channel it is so good what are you doing because i'm just getting coffee i was like well i have a seat right here me and my daughter are are gonna have a coffee would you like to hang out with me and so i sat with an hour with this guy and he told me all about the neighborhood and all about the beauty of like the architecture and that is like where i'll learn and like get stories is i'll just go up and like talk to him or find another person who i love and it's it's been a blast like following my nose of like what interesting that's hilarious that's amazing hey i i spent an hour with this guy i have an extra baby seat here you wanna know well i had there was like i had the best seat in the house at it and i go do you wanna sit down and just like talk and hang out with me and like great it work like that's up with me you but anyway i've been that that's usually what i what i do to like learn is i like this usually what i do i meet a former actor turned like cultural at the copies that's not what you usually do right no i immense myself like i get interested in like a topic and i'll immense myself and then i go out and i talk to people about it so i do feel trips this was a lucky field trip but i would do field trips all the time where it's like i'll hear about a museum doing a thing or i'll fly somewhere that that's why i like to learn that's cool yeah you should publish more of that i think that's great well that's cool i guess i should i never really thought of it as particularly unique how do you when you read a book or a topic what do you do yeah i'm like kind of a similar thing just a little less structured as in like i think my attention spans a little shorter meaning like once i once the idea clicks i get this extreme high of feeling like i just learned something cool or know something now and then i wanna go to do it and i don't wanna keep researching and then also and also it'll lead me to the next thing which is totally unrelated you know like i had this whole phase on the creative process which i was reading about seinfeld filled in the band story and all this stuff like super super into that and then it'll be like old school marketers and then it'll be you know the posterior chain and like why my hamstrings are so tight what what should posture actually be and how do i fix that you know like it just be like random stuff like that where i'll get you know a similar season but i think mine are shorter because i am less diligent about doing it yeah i my preferred way of doing is if i think i'm gonna be interested in topic i try to research like roughly three to six books on the topic and i commit to going deep on right because i don't want to be persuaded when it gets look like i don't i wanna make my decision in advance that i'm going to consume instead because otherwise you have the problem have which is like anytime you hit a low where you just like are not getting like amazing feedback loop of learning new things or you know finding something interesting it's easy to eject because this was a voluntary thing anyways it wasn't like for a specific outcome or result whereas i think i would be better served if i did it your way where i like pre commit the time and it's like look i can't do anything else during that this time i'm just gonna keep keep wandering around here because i bet i'm giving up at the first lull but there's still like a lot more gold to find if i just carry on you know if i if just want to keep wandering for a little bit longer and oftentimes is what people tend to do is they think that researching what to research next or researching what to do next is actually productivity when it's not productivity is actually doing anything but yeah brent hey renaissance sam what can i say the rem sounds alright that's it go ahead and hit him with line that's it that's a odd i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back my friends if you like m m then you're gonna like the following podcast it's called a billion dollar moves and of course it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the number one audio destination for biz professionals billion dollar moves it's hosted by sarah chen spelling sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist and with billion dollar moves she wants to look at unicorn founders and fund and she looks for what she calls the unexpected leader many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic she does it with unfiltered conversations about success failure fear courage and all that great stuff so again if you like my first million check out billion dollar moves it's brought to you by the hotspot hubspot podcast network again billion dollar moves alright back to the episode