190 What Makes or Breaks an Entrepreneur with Darren Hardy

"People get into businesses they have no business being in." - Darren Hardy If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and more at lewishowes.com/190. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 190 with New York Times bestselling author and Success Magazine publisher, Darren Hardy.

• 0:09Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:34Lewis Howes?

  Now, this episode is a very special one because I first met Darren Hardy a few years back, probably four or five years ago at an event. And everything about him and his energy embodied success. But it wasn't this flashy, know-it-all type of success. It was this grounded, centered approach to success. I couldn't really put my finger on it at the time of what it was. But his energy was so poised and confident without being cocky that I just knew I wanted to learn more about him and be around him. And when we had time to chat, he was just, again, grounded and humble, but also confident at the same time. He had this special quality about him that was extremely magnetic.

• 1:17Lewis Howes?

  And for those that don't know who Darren is, he's a visionary force behind Success Magazine as a publisher and founding editor, which reaches 3 million ambitious achievers around the world every month. And he's also the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of what has been called the modern day Think and Grow Rich, which is called The Compound Effect, that book, and the worldwide movement to onboard 10 million new entrepreneurs through his latest book, The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster. Why now is the time to join the ride? Now, I had a great time diving into this interview. And we really talk about why so many entrepreneurs and business owners fail. You know, so many people fail, but they think it's due to outside factors, when really

• 2:02Lewis Howes?

  it's due to the emotional internal factors. And we cover what those are. And then also Darren dives into the Four keys to success for any entrepreneur and we really dive deep into some of those. So make sure to get out a pen and paper. I have a lot of notes that I just took down through this interview. I loved it. I hope you get a lot out of this and make sure to share this with your friends and check out his book, The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster. I'll have everything linked up in the show notes at the end of this interview where you can go and click to get all the information on Darren, where you can get his book and all that good stuff. But for now, let's go ahead and dive into this episode with the one, the only Darren Hardy.

• 2:44Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. Very excited about today's guest. He is New York Times bestselling author and the publisher of Success Magazine. We've got Darren Hardy on the line. How's it going Darren?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  It's going great Louis. Appreciate you having me on.

• 2:58Lewis Howes?

  Awesome. Very excited about this. We were talking about how we met up a few years back and at a conference that a mutual friend of ours had put on and you've just grown exponentially since then. It's been incredible to see your growth and I'm super excited to learn all about it and also dive into your new book, The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster. Why now is the time to join the ride? So I'm curious, why did you decide to write this book right now?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Well, as publisher of Success Magazine, our great mission in life is to empower entrepreneurs globally. And so as the steward of this great endeavor, I spent the last several years trying to figure out, you know, why is it that most entrepreneurs out there fail? And we know statistically, 66% of all small businesses fail and that's two thirds. I mean, those people that finally muster up the courage to step out of the herd, the herd of those that are employed and having other people be dependent for their future and finally join the ranks of entrepreneurship and then two thirds fail. This to me was tragic and incredibly disheartening and it filled me with a great sense of purpose and passion

• 4:09Speaker 01

  to say, you know, what can we do to try to change this tide? So spending several years trying to figure out what are the factors that cause entrepreneurs to fail and all the previously written about books and reports and And, you know, assessments for the cause of those failures were wrong. I mean, it wasn't due to outside factors. It wasn't due to economic reasons, or not enough capital, or inventory problems, or competition, or technology. The reality was, is that they were due to internal factors. That these entrepreneurs were not really ready emotionally to handle the difficulties,

• 4:48Speaker 01

  the sense of self-identity crisis, the rejection, the fear, the doubt, the self-esteem, the self-image, that they have to go through in order to get to the other side of success. And so, I wanted to figure out, okay, there's lots of things written about entrepreneurship out there, but most of them have to create more complexity than clarity. They create more confusion than certainty. They make someone feel overwhelmed and baffled, rather than confident and empowered. So how do we figure out, what are the essentials? What are the, not 100 things they need to know and learn, not 50, not 25, but there

• 5:31Speaker 01

  really comes down to four essential skills that one needs to master in order to become successful as an entrepreneur. And, these things aren't really taught in school, and for most people, they're not even part of the conditioning of how they grew up. And so, if you don't go out and proactively seek these, and know that these are the vital few, and then go deeply into the discovery of where to get mastery, that's why, you know, two-thirds will end up failing, because it's trial and error, and sometimes fortuitous luck, and happenstance and timing that's the reason for their success, rather than, no, there's a formula, there's a foundation, and once you get it set in place, and you

• 6:14Speaker 01

  know the skills, and you apply them, success can be rather secure, as an entrepreneur.

• 6:23Lewis Howes?

  I love it. So what are these four skills then, and how did you discover them personally?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Well, when you boil it all down, of all the variable factors of what one needs to master to be successful as an entrepreneur, the four come down to, number one, sales. Nothing happens until somebody sells something, right? I mean, sales is the beginning, the middle, and the end of success as an entrepreneur. And too often, people think they know how to sell. They basically just repeat the patterns of their childhood, which is, you know, throwing temper tantrums and just pushing and begging and pleading and prodding as the method of sales. And it's exactly opposite and wrong. The second is recruiting. When it comes right down to it, it's who can find and retain and draw the best out of top-level talent.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  We're in a knowledge worker society these days to compete on a global platform. It's a talent war. And your business will only be as good as the people that you have in it. And so, learning how to recruit, how to vet the decoys from the true players, and then how to keep them and how to draw the best out of them, how to motivate them, and how to build teams of talented players is an essential skill nobody ever really teaches you anywhere. And so, recruiting is number two. Leadership. Most, everything anybody knows about leadership today is wrong. Why? Because we learn leadership by watching our parents and our fathers and our grandfather who came through the 20th century.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  And, you know, we had this military-industrial complex, industrial society-based, top-down, patriarchal. Now, we've got five generations working in the workplace at any one time. It's mostly female, it's heavily minority, and it's dominated by millennials. That was not a challenge that our parents or grandparents ever faced. And so, most everything you know about leadership is wrong, because you're just repeating the patterns, the sins of the father, so to speak. And so, leadership for the 21st century is essential if you're going to succeed in this collaborative, global, very diverse marketplace that we've got today. And the last one... Is productivity. I think that the most important skill of the 21st century by any achiever

• 8:41Speaker 01

  for any endeavor whatsoever is learning how to control your attention and keep your focus in this era of epic distraction and all these open portals of solicitations coming at us from every device we've got open to us. We're just living through the most incredibly tumultuous, attention distracting times we've ever seen in human history. And so, learning how to keep your personal productivity is essential and learning how to get your team to keep focused is essential. So, those are the four: sales, recruiting leadership, and personal productivity.

• 9:18Lewis Howes?

  So, when did you come about understanding or learning these four skills? Was it, did it happen in the beginning of your first business? Has it happened over time? Or did someone teach you this? Or how did you really come to that conclusion?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I started out as an entrepreneur like everybody starts out. I started out nervous, scared, afraid, without a clue of what to do or what to expect as an entrepreneur. I had no prior experience. I had no training. I had no guidance whatsoever. And so, thus, I mostly did it wrong. I got a lot of skin knees, a lot of bloody noses, lots of bruises on my pride and ego. But that's also how I figured out how to do it right. You know, my life for the last several decades has been a living laboratory of trial, error, failure, and ultimately, to some degree, success. And that's why I wrote the book, to help save would-be entrepreneurs

• 10:11Speaker 01

  and veteran entrepreneurs lots of unnecessary headache, heartache, and wallet ache to significantly accelerate their success by helping them do it right the first time. So, it's the conclusion of a very long, hard-fought, bloodied journey that I have taken to figure out, okay, when you boil it all down, what are the essential skills one needs for any business or endeavor? And then, Even more important than that are what are the essential components of that skill that are most critical? Because there are volumes of books written about in sales. And again, it's one of those things where you read them and you become more confused and you become empowered.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Volumes of books on leadership, most of which are out of date and wrong, volumes of books on hiring talent. But there's only a few really, really critical fundamental essentials inside each of those essential skills. And so that's the digest. I sort of call it, you know, if you wanted to, I'm doing a workshop next week and I use the analogy that if you're reading The Old Man and the Sea and you read it for the first time, you know, you're gonna miss most of the nuances of what the book is about. But if you sat down and read the Cliff Notes first and somebody, a professional who does this for a living with experience basically outlined it for you, and then you read the

• 11:38Speaker 01

  book, you're like, whoa, I see it in a whole different layers and depths that I would have never have seen before. And so that's essentially what I'm doing for most every entrepreneur is like, I've taken the hard journey and I'm gonna give you the digest version of what are the essentials and lay it out for you. So now when you take the journey, you'll see it and experience it in a completely different light. It's almost like, you know, I've taken the test and I've found the answers and I'm giving you the answers before you take the test. It's gonna help you get an A much easier, much faster.

• 12:12Lewis Howes?

  Sure. I want to dive, there's a number of things I want to dive into. First is the emotional and inner work that you say most people miss out on, and that's why 66% of people fail in small businesses. What are the inner, I guess, intangibles that people should be focusing on to improve their emotions or their mentality? Or what is it that people are missing out on internally that's holding them back?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of the biggest mistakes most entrepreneurs make when they first get started is that they expect everyone around them to be excited for them. I mean, you're excited, you've got this great idea, you're gonna launch out at your own business, and you're excited, and you expect everybody to be excited for you. But the reality is true. Even if they say they're excited for you, the reality is true. Because here's what happens. When you leave the 90%, when you leave the herd, the herd turns on you. You know, when you stop being like other people, other people stop liking you. And you have to remember that 90% of the population is employed. And a lot of times, the people who love and care for you, or are closest to you, are the ones that turn on you the most severely.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  And you go, "Well, why would these people who love and care about me, you know, wanna see me fail?" The reason is, and now, it won't be even, for some of us, it's not even a conscious reality. It's very unconscious. And the reason is, is that when you step out of the herd, you prove that it's possible. And it's a giant mirror reflecting back on them. You see, it's not about you actually leaving the herd. It's about them being left behind, and the reality that they're choosing to stay and not join you going forward. And so, this is an attack on their ego. See, it's easy to point to people on the cover of Success Magazine, or on Blueburn's

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Icon shows, or the other, you know, Zuckerbergs, or Gates, or Bransons of the world. "Ah, well, they went to the great schools, and, you know, lucky them," and, you know, all the rest of that. But when somebody in their own family, their own peer group, leaves the herd, it proves that it's possible. And instead of choosing to follow, or to gain their own courage and step out themselves, it's easier to try to tear the other person down, and hope, and again, sometimes it's very unconsciously, hope that they actually fail to, once again, make themselves feel okay about themselves and their life. There's an old adage that says, you know, "How successful does a man really need to

• 14:53Speaker 01

  be?" And the answer is, "More successful than his daughter, or than his wife's sister's husband is all." Right, because by contrast and comparison, if somebody else in the family is doing better than than you, that's what makes you feel terrible about your own lot in life. But so that's the contrast and comparison dynamics emotionally that get worked up inside a family. So that's the first inner war that one has to deal with is the people around them are actually quietly, silently, maybe sometimes unconsciously hoping that they fail. And it's not about the entrepreneur, it's about the person in reflection.

• 15:36Lewis Howes?

  That's so interesting because, you know, for years, I was, you know, I left college to go after my dream to play professional football. And I finally, you know, played professional football and I made it. And it was like, each step, I got closer and closer to making it. My college friends and teammates, who some of them were better than me, who didn't pursue that dream. It's like they didn't want to talk to me, they didn't want to hang out with me, they didn't want to hear about it. And, you know, I've lost touch with almost all of them now, because and I would try to reach out and try to stay connected, but it was like they just were so distant. And I never understood why they wouldn't be happy for me, or why they wouldn't be, you know, supporting me. And I think that makes complete sense. So, that's crazy.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and every, every, every, every, every great entrepreneur, every great achiever has, has suffered the same consequence. I mean, Gandhi said, you know, first they ignore you. Oh, yeah, you're gonna get into another business. Let's see what happens this time. Oh, you're gonna start another diet program. Okay, sure. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, you know, oh, you know, how's it going now? Are you making any money yet? And then when you do, they fight you. And then ultimately, you win, as Gandhi said. So first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. And if you look at the path of any great achiever, whether it be Martin Luther King, heck, Jesus of Nazareth, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, they've all suffered the same.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Path as Gandhi warned, they ignore you, they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then ultimately you win. And so it's just the emotional trauma or turmoil that one has to go through when they do step out of the herd of normality, uh, which is the typical society.

• 17:18Lewis Howes?

  Right. And I don't know if you've experienced this, but after you win, it seems like for me, a lot of my friends from my college like 10 years ago, now reach out to me on Facebook and say, hey, can you help me out with this X, Y, and Z? Or can you, you know, help me fund this or invest in me? And it's like, now they want to come back and, you know, be my friend again type of thing. I don't know if you've experienced that.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it, it just goes to prove that it was never about you. Like it wasn't that they were actually, uh, you know, criticizing you or your dream. It was what you were making, how you were making them look and feel to themselves. And, you know, now when you're successful, it's, it's still about them. How can you now help them?

• 18:03Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, in the, in this process.

• 18:06Lewis Howes?

  What, what advice would you give to someone who, like, how can someone navigate that? Knowing that that's probably going to happen to some of your close circle, your friends, your family, the herd you're in, that when you go out on a limb and when you join the, the roller coaster ride as an entrepreneur, how does someone navigate those waters? And how do they internalize it, deal with it emotionally? Do they confront those people? Do they embrace them? Do they support those people that are attacking them? What do they do?

• 18:35Speaker 01

  First, first you just have to know that it's going to happen. So there's a great example. Uh, I have a friend who is the CEO of a very successful company in Salt Lake City, and he's Mormon, and we were talking about the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurship. And he says, you know, it reminds me of when I was 18 years old, I was about to be sent out on mission, 4,000 miles away from home. And he says, look, you didn't, you'd have to know, I, I've never been that far from the bosom of my mother. I mean, I'd, I'd never been out of Salt Lake City. And I was going to be sent 4,000 miles away. So the elders brought me in, they sat me down, and they told me every ugly, nasty, awful, horrible, wretched thing that somebody might say about our religion, about me, about what I was doing there and so forth. And he said, thank God they did. Because if I'd gotten 4,000 miles away and I had heard these people say these things

• 19:20Speaker 01

  for the very first time, it would have devastated me. I might not have ever recovered. But because they warned me when I got over there and people said those things, I was able to point at them and say, "Oh, my God, you said it just like they said you would say. Isn't that funny?" They were emotionally bulletproof because they expected it to come. And so, really, the first thing is, entrepreneurs just need to know that it's going to happen. For most of them, it happens and they don't know, and they don't know why. And so, the answer to your other question is, what do you do about it? You love them anyway because it's not about you, it's about them. When they criticize what you're doing and your

• 20:05Speaker 01

  business or your idea, they're mostly speaking about the hurt and pain they're feeling about themselves on the inside, that they don't have the same sort of courage to do what you're doing. And it's much easier to try to bring your dream down than it is to go out and to pursue their own. So, there's a story I tell in the Entrepreneur Railroad Coaster book about a crab, and this crab has the dexterity to climb out of any trap that you set for it. I mean, it's used to climbing around coral, rock reefs, and so forth. But yet, we pull them out of the ocean by the tonnage every single day. And the way you do it is you get this wire basket, and you just put a little crab feet at the bottom of it, you lower it to the bottom of the ocean, a crab comes along, sees the crab feet in, jumps into the basket, and starts munching on it. Another crab comes along,

• 20:49Speaker 01

  sees that there's some food in it, jumps in, starts joining it. More crabs come along, jump in the basket. Even when all the crab food is gone, the crabs, by the allure of the majority, will continue to jump in the basket and join the other crabs, which sounds familiar, the way most society works. But if one of the crabs gets the bright idea of saying, "Hey, there's no opportunity here. I'm going to leave this trap and go look elsewhere," the other crabs will gang up on it and try to knock it off the wall as it is trying to climb out. If the crab persists, they'll actually break its arm so that it can't climb any further. If the crab persists further, they will gang up on it and kill

• 21:29Speaker 01

  it. And so, by the force of majority, they're brought up by the tonnage, and it's feast on the pier. And so, that crab shares a very similar human quality.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  And when somebody in the herd decides to leave it, they might not physically break your arm, but they will try to break your spirit. And they might not try to kill you physically, but they will try to kill your dreams. And so if you know that it's going to happen, and if you know why it's happening, it's not about you or your dream at all. It's about them and the pain their ego feels in the sight and the potential for them to be embarrassed about their own life because your life has become so successful and you gained the courage to go do something extraordinary and go on your heroic journey and answer

• 22:27Speaker 01

  the call of adventure, as Joseph Campbell would call it. So when you know it's gonna happen and you know why it's happening, none of those actually now have power over you and you expect it and you can move right through it.

• 22:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's powerful. I'm curious, what, you know, who were your mentors growing up and who really inspired you to get on this path early on, you know, maybe in your teen years or something like that? What were the people that really inspired you?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, that question and the answer to it is also the big reason for my motivation behind doing the Entrepreneur Roller Coaster book and the Entrepreneur Fastpass training curriculum that I've built that launches actually next week. And the process came down like this. My grandfather was an employee for Berkeley Farms Creamery for 40-plus years. I mean, a dutiful, loyal employee. He got up at 4:30 every morning. You could set your watch to it. He had his crews running by 5:30 in the morning. And, I mean, just diligent, loyal, trusted, and he retired and barely could survive on his pension. My father, who saw his father, thought, well, that's what I'm gonna do. I gotta be an employee.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  And so he graduated, first of our family to graduate from college, got his master's degree and became an employee. He was a football coach for the university, but was an employee. I mean, the year I was born, his paycheck, I just saw it a couple of years ago, was $11,000 for that whole year. And that was gonna be his path. He was then gonna be a teacher and a professor and so forth. But his college football coach at Cal State.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Hayward, whose name was Les Davis, went into the real estate business and pushed and poked and prodded my dad to join him in the real estate business. My dad at this point had three kids, a runaway freight train for a wife. I mean, it was not financially feasible for him to take the risk financially to become an entrepreneur. But Les Davis was very charismatic, very persuasive and persistent. And my dad started just helping him on the weekends and doing open houses and then some nights during the week. When his entrepreneurial income exceeded his full-time income, he finally felt that it was safe enough for him to go into real estate full-time. And that happened when I was very young. And so I saw, growing up my whole life, my dad be an entrepreneur, ultimately owning

• 24:48Speaker 01

  up his own real estate company. So entrepreneurship was a very real possibility for me because I saw my dad do it. In fact, because my dad did it, I wanted to do it. Sure. But that's not the case for most people. But if it hadn't been for Les Davis, if Les Davis hadn't pushed and poked and prodded and been my dad's mentor and helped him make the transition into entrepreneurship, I might not be speaking with you today. And my life would be radically different. I might be an employee somewhere, not knowing otherwise, because my own frame of reference would have been just whatever it is that I experienced. And so entrepreneurship changed my life.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm sitting here talking to you in a high-rise condo on the beach in South Beach, Miami, as one of my second homes. My whole lifestyle has been made possible because of entrepreneurship. There's no way I'd be who I am today if I had not started out as an entrepreneur when I was 18 years old. So that's what I want for other people. I want to be the Les Davis for other people's life and lifestyle, and it will change generations of that family. Forever. So, you know, my mentor was my father and through my dad's mentorship with his father. And then, you know, as publisher of Success Magazine, I get a chance to sit down and do what you're doing with me and interview some of the most extraordinary

• 26:11Speaker 01

  people on the planet. I mean, there's probably not a name you can you can name that I haven't interviewed or we've not presented on the cover of Success Magazine. So, you know, the kaleidoscope of the greatest achievers alive and some no longer alive today are have all in their own way been a mentor of mine over the last eight years in particular, but over the last 20, as I've been in the the thought leader or the personal development business for that long.

• 26:41Lewis Howes?

  Sure, yeah. That's a powerful story. Thanks for sharing that. I'm curious, has there ever been a big dream of yours since from since you were 18 till till now that you set out to launch a business and you had this belief that it was going to be so big, it was going to reach millions of people, you were going to make millions of dollars, and it was actually the complete opposite and was a huge failure? Have you had one of those?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, which one? I mean, absolutely. You know, I've had a multitude of failures. You know, I I lost a billion dollars.

• 27:18Lewis Howes?

  Wow, really?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  And I say that because we, well, I mean, we started a photo and video sharing site called Drop Shots, basically about six to eight months behind YouTube.

• 27:31Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  And I mean, really, it was like, I remember the, I remember the the time when YouTube basically went from obscurity to a runaway freight train. And it really was the SNL Lazy Sunday video. That really was the moment. That one video kind of put YouTube on the map. And up until that point, we'd kind of been neck and neck. And, and so, but we were a little bit further behind in time, timing wise, in terms of scaling. Another business that I started in early 2000, we raised millions of dollars for, it was called Retired.com. And it was on the back of, you know, the big internet boom that ultimately became bust.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Uh, but I poured hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own money into it with sure it was gonna be the next, you know, broadcast.com kind of epic story, but which was what? Bought by five, five point seven billion dollars by Yahoo.

• 28:29Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  It didn't exist six, six months later, but I mean, retire.com, the last bastion to get on the internet, the 50 plus generation, you know, we, we, we acquired the URL for a million dollars. It was like the perfect, the thing. And yeah, I mean, I, I lost everything. I mean, everything I put into it. I lost a year and a half plus two years maybe of my life and hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars of venture raised funding. So, look, you know, the old adage is, is that if, if you get to the plate and, and swing at the ball, you're gonna strike out more times than you're gonna succeed. One of my other mentors was a gentleman by the name of Paul J. Meyer, and he ended

• 29:11Speaker 01

  up becoming fabulously wealthy. I mean, he owns most of the Cayman Islands. He's, he's since passed. But he told me, he says, you know, 90% of everything I've ever started failed, but that 10%, that 10% has made me wealthy.

• 29:26Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  And, and, and that's, that's the reality. I mean, I know I have failed more often than I have succeeded, but the, it only takes, in some cases, only takes one, but over a period of a lifetime, you know, a couple, a few times that you succeed and they, they pay for all the failures, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, and you end up wealthy.

• 29:44Lewis Howes?

  Right. What do you think the biggest, when you're looking back on those, you know, failures, which with me, I think of failures as feedback, feedback of what worked and what didn't work at the time. I don't look at it as failures. But for those, those failures, what do you think was missing from you or missing in the moment in order for them to be successful?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Well, two things. One, um,

• 30:08Speaker 01

  And I don't like to give, certain businesses require a sense of timing. Sure. You know, the old real estate, the old real estate adage is, is location, location, location, and the business adage is timing, timing, timing. And so with some type of businesses, timing is essential, like the retired.com, the photo and video sharing service, those, those were definitely factors of, you would say, timing definitely played a part of that failure. But mostly, across the board, any failures that I've had is when the business didn't rely upon my, what I call, superpower. You know, the, the unique strength that I've got to contribute to any endeavor.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  When I got involved in a business that didn't center around the need for that strength, which meant that I couldn't be the difference maker, and whether it succeeded or failure, or we, you needed some sort of tea leaves, or some other sort of assets or contributions that were not under my bailiwick, so to speak. That's when I failed. That's when I failed. So, and I think it's one of the great mistakes most people make, is they get into businesses they have no business being in. And what I mean by that is, is, is, once you identify your unique strength, I mean, each of us has some superpower, something that we do better than anybody else. And it doesn't have to be hitting a baseball, or throwing a football.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  It could just be the way we operate. There's some unique, special skill, talent you've been bestowed. And you, also, by the way, usually ends up being the thing you love doing as well, because we love doing things that we're good at. And those usually, usually line up. So the old adage of, you know, find what you love and, and pursue it. It's deeper than that. It's really, you know, find the thing you're really great at, that you have a special gift and talent for, and.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  It will also probably be the thing that you love as well, but just because you love something, I can love, you know, making model airplanes. I don't, by the way, let's just say I love making model airplanes. Yeah, but if I suck at it or nobody wants to buy it, it's not a viable viable business. You know, it's a three, a three-part criteria. See if I can pull it off the top of my head. Number one is, is figure out something that you're really, really great at, uniquely talented for. It's probably also the thing that you love. Number two, have it be doing something that people want to buy.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  And because you could love doing something, but if nobody cares, it's not a business. It's a hobby. And then three is that they'll buy it at a profit. Cause there are a lot of things you love doing and people will buy, but you can't, you can't sell enough of them or at a great enough margin to make it a business. So it still becomes a hobby. But if you get those three in alignment, it's something that you're uniquely talented and gifted at, and you love doing, and people want to buy it, and you can do it at a profit, you got a business. You're in, you're in business.

• 33:07Lewis Howes?

  That's pretty powerful. And what's your superpower then?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Well, mine is the ability to communicate. Really, I mean, it's funny, I've been in a dozen different industries and

• 33:20Speaker 01

  let's just say I've been to more than a dozen, but the dozen that I was successful at, even though the industries were radically different in themselves. Products were different, industries themselves were different. Marketplace was different, different type of customers and clients were all different. But every time I was successful at it, it was because I was leading the charge from a communication standpoint. I was the public spokesperson. I was the, even for success, right, you know, right now, I'm the, the living embodiment, human spokesperson for the brand. And of all the, the tasks and functions that a publisher performs inside an organization, the three, what I call vital functions that I contribute to the organization aren't

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Editing, you know, the editorial or running meetings or, or, or, you know, recruiting advertisers, the rest of it. My three vital functions are, you know, primarily speaking at large conferences as a keynote speaker to enroll more members into the quote unquote "success" community. It is creating content like the Entrepreneur Roller Coaster book that is another form of communication and it's talking to you and your audience about the tenants of what we do at success and what I want to help people

• 34:43Speaker 01

  do as an entrepreneur. So, so communication has been the, the, the superpower for, for most of the things that I have done successfully.

• 34:52Lewis Howes?

  Right. I love that. And we're, we've got a few minutes left, so there's so many more questions I want to ask, but I want to get to just a couple of questions left to respect your time. You know, you talk about these four points to success: sales, recruiting, leadership, and productivity. And in the book, you've got, you know, tons of information on, on all of these. I want to cover really quickly the first one on sales. You said, you know, you, you want to learn how to make it simple, how to make sales simple because people over complicate it sometimes. So, in order to make it simple for people, what should they understand about it? What should they know about selling that to make it simple?

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, I'll, I'll give you what I call the three grave mistakes that people make in, in selling. Number one is they fall in love with their product. And, you know, people are, we tell you, "Love what you do, love your product." But that's the mistake is that you're in love with your product and you can't see the forest through the trees. And, you know, quite frankly, what you need to fall in love with is your client.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  You need to fall in love with the outcomes that you want to create for your client. So, see, here's the pathway that most people think about their business. They go, "What product do I want to create? What do I love? What do I want to create? You know, I want to create mini cupcakes. I love mini cupcakes." Or whatever it is. They have a love for something that they want to create. And then they go, "Okay, now I need to market and sell this." And they create the sales and marketing around the product that they've created. And then they go, "Okay, I need to go and find clients, the traffic, and you get people to get this sales and marketing in front of people." And that's sort of the... They never really even get to the outcome, or the transformation, or the better future that's created if they use the product or service that they've created.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  And I say, "You've got to go at that exactly backwards." Which means that you want to start with the transformation. Like, when I decided that... When it came down to writing the book, The Entrepreneurial Roller Coaster, I started with the transformation. I thought, "What is it that I want to bring to the world? What outcome? What result do I want to help make happen in the world?" And because of the gift that was given to me, which is called entrepreneurship, because we champion the entrepreneur globally, it's like, "Okay, I want to help transform the results, the success factor for the entrepreneur." And so that's where I started. So, start with the transformation. And then I go, "Okay, well, who's the client?"

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Well, for The Entrepreneurial Roller Coaster, it started primarily with the early-stage entrepreneur, the one that's just getting on-boarded into... Or the aspiring entrepreneur, the sitting on the sidelines, they want to, but they just don't know how. They're a little nervous and scared, and if somebody could just make it easy and certain for them that they would step forward. I've actually been surprised that very, very veteran entrepreneurs, some of the people that I admire, that the book had a profound impact on them. They said it just sort of simplified and clarified everything. They see some things that they've drifted from, that they did when in the beginning, that they aren't doing anymore, and it helped refine some of those core essential skills,

• 38:07Speaker 01

  levels higher than they had even refined for themselves. But it was really, essentially, in the beginning, when it was thought through, it was that early-stage entrepreneur. So, that's the client. And then you go back... The step before that, it's like, okay, what's the sales and marketing that needs to be created to communicate the transformation to that client? Okay, now we've got that, now let's write the book. Now let's create the product. Now, now let's build the widget that basically fulfills the transformation. It's the reason why Jeff Bezos is crushing it. I mean, if there's a guy like, who's gonna win the monopoly board? I got my money on Bezos.

• 38:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  I mean, you could say, you could say Apple, you could say Facebook, you could say Google. I say Amazon. Amazon's gonna run the monopoly board. And, and the biggest reason for that is Jeff Bezos starts with the customer, starts with trying to solve what, what's, what's the pain point for the customer? What, what does the customer want to achieve? And what is the pain that I want to help them get over? And then he works backwards. Then he, then he, then he, you know, finds which, which of the customer sets? What's the communication to them about it in a delivery system for it? And what's the, the, the problem that, that we're trying to solve? And so, so then, then that has been the beginning of new products, new initiatives, new, um, new

• 39:33Speaker 01

  programs inside of Amazon have happened because he started with the customer and then worked themselves backwards.

• 39:38Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. I could talk to you forever, Darren, and I, I know you got to run to a few other things right now, but I've got a couple of questions left. One is, um, if, if, if today was your last day, hopefully you live a long life, but if today was the last day and everything was deleted on the internet, your books were gone, the magazine was gone for, for some freak thing, it was all gone. And you had a piece of paper and a pen to write down the three truths you know about everything you've learned in business and life and relationships and communication, the three truths of life that you get to leave behind. I'm curious, what would those three truths be for you?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Number one would be that you can do it. And I know that sounds really trite, but for so long, we're told by commercial media and by authorities who know better and by religious dogma, you know, that we can't, or that we're not good enough, or the voices in our own head. I just wish I knew and believed that even earlier, that I can do it. And I can do anything that I want if I set my mind to it and I'm willing to endure the trials and tribulations of the process. So it really all starts there and ends there. I mean, this is a blank canvas.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Life, we can create and design and achieve and experience anything we want. It's truly limitless. But we believe that as kids, as really young, young kids, that anything's possible. So, hey, I want to be an astronaut, or I want to be a fireman, or I want to be a professional football player. We truly believe that. And then society and the world around has sort of convinced us against that. So I would want to remember that first and foremost. And then when it comes to achieving anything in the world of the human system we've got, it's the old Zig Ziglar quote, "You can have anything you want in life as long as you help enough other people get what they want." And so when you just really operate from that standpoint, it's what can I help somebody

• 41:52Speaker 01

  else achieve? When we had Peter Diamantes on the cover of Success Magazine, he said, you know, "It's really not that difficult to be a billionaire. All you have to do is solve a problem that a billion people have." Right, right, exactly. And that they're willing to pay you a dollar for, you know? Right. And so, but it's a very different, I tell you, it sounds obvious, but every, most of the leadership meetings I'm in, people are saying, "What can we sell? How can we increase our revenue? How can we accomplish our goals?" Versus the opposite, which is, what can we help people with? What's truly the problem that, and the pain, and the desire, the aspiration that people have?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  And approach everything from that standpoint. Every communication, every phone call, every interaction you have with somebody else, like, what's going on for them? And what is it that I can help? Help them achieve. So I guess that would be number two.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  And then I would just remind myself again, I think that in the that failure and rejection and being knocked down is what my dad, you know, had taught me very earlier that, you know, when we were skiing one day, I was eight years old, I skied by myself all day and I was so excited that I didn't fall down. One time I said, Dad, Dad, Dad, I didn't fall down all day. And he looked at me and he says, Well, then you didn't get any better.

• 43:25Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  I says, What do you mean? He says, Look, if you don't push yourself past your existing level of performance and fall down, you can't get any better. And when you fall down, that means you're getting better. And so, but we become so fear and failure averse because mostly to do with our ego and how it's going to look and how people are going to think about us. And so, we do everything we can to protect that reputation of success. And thus, we stagnate and settle into our pathways of mediocrity. So, the third would be is to fail, fail fast, fail big, fail often, and delight in the fact that you are failing.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Because life's a pendulum. You push the pendulum on the side of failure, it swings in equilibrium on the side of success. But so many people aren't willing to push that pendulum on the only side that they control, which is the side of failure, rejection, and defeat. It doesn't swing in for them very far on the other side. And that becomes the trap of their comfort zone.

• 44:30Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Awesome. I love those three truths. Thanks for that. Final question before I ask you, I just want to take a moment, Darren, to acknowledge you for coming on and sharing your wisdom. But also, I want to acknowledge you for your consistent commitment to success and to excellence in the world. Every time I hear about you, every time I see something you put out online, it's always to like the highest standard of success. And you show me what's possible for myself. And I know you show millions of people around the world what's possible for them as well. Well, by the constant commitment you have to excellence. So I want to acknowledge you for that Darren. And for being open to to share today. I know it's going to help all my listeners. My final question, and I want to make sure everyone gets the entrepreneur roller coaster.

• 45:15Lewis Howes?

  I'll have it all linked up here on the show notes. I'll tell you guys where to go. There's also some extra bonuses. First couple of chapters of Darren's book. I'll let you guys know where to go for that here in a second. But the final question Darren is what is your definition of greatness?

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I appreciate you actually saying the word excellence. It's one of my three core values and it's the thing that I pursue most all day, every day and everything that I do. So I appreciate the acknowledgement of that because it means that I'm I'm I'm living out that that great objective, which is actually the answer to your question as well is greatness is is is living out your own decided upon core values. And it doesn't have to be the the the idea that your parents gave you or or your neighbor's idea or the Kardashians idea of what greatness or success looks like. It has to be yours and it takes a long time for people to

• 46:14Speaker 01

  get themselves away from the conditioning that they have been given by their parents or by other authority figures or by commercial media about what greatness needs to look like for them and and choose to to design their own definition and then live in accordance to that and get up every day and pursue that that definition. So that's what it is for me is is deciding what it is that greatness is for you. Because it's wildly different for everybody. I mean, I've got brothers and in-laws that have very different career paths and do very different things in life. That, you know, if I were a different person, I would go, oh, that's just so not not great. But in reality,

• 46:54Speaker 01

  it's incredibly great for them for what they've chosen to do and in many cases they're even more joyful and feel more fulfilled and more soulfully fulfilled than than than me or than than than most other people. So so I can't give you any Your definition of success, I could just say, find your definition of success and then, and then live in it each and every day. That's greatness to me.

• 47:23Lewis Howes?

  I love it. Darren, thank you so much for your time. Thanks so much for your wisdom and your excellence. I appreciate it. And thanks again for all you do.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Thank you, Lewis. It's been a pleasure.

• 47:34Lewis Howes?

  There you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode with the fantastic Darren Hardy. Again, loved his energy, love his message. Make sure to pick up a copy of his book. We'll have it linked up here at LewisHowes.com/190. Go ahead and go back to the site. You'll get all the information from today's episode and all the information on how to connect with Darren and get a copy of his book. Again, LewisHowes.com/190. Also, please share it with your friends if you enjoyed this episode and you know that there are some struggling entrepreneurs out there. Go ahead and share this episode with them and have them listen and hopefully it'll give them some inspiration to keep pressing forward and some inspiring things on what to work on moving forward if they feel like they're not being successful. I

• 48:17Lewis Howes?

  appreciate you guys. I am so fired up. We're almost at 200 episodes. Been doing this for about two and a half years, over 7 million downloads. And the, the growth just continues to inspire me and get me fired up to bring you incredible guests each and every week. Every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we've got episodes to get you inspired, moving towards greatness in your business, relationships, health, life, and everything else. I am so blessed to be here and to facilitate this podcast for all of you. Thank you for being here, for sharing the message, for subscribing, for being a part of this community. It inspires me every day. You guys know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.