#56 - The Recession Proof Skill Sets

Sam (@thesamparr) is by himself today without Shaan (@shaanvp) to tell you about what he thinks are 4 essential skill sets that will withstand a recession. Questions about any of these? Ask the hosts directly on www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  All right, it's 10:30 a.m. in San Francisco. I'm by myself in the studio because Shawn wants to be with his newborn baby because he's a little nervous about this whole Corona thing. He doesn't want to be out walking around. Don't blame him. And I don't feel like talking about business opportunities right now. I stayed up late last night monitoring this whole Corona thing in the stock market. It's scary. It's a scary time. I don't know what the reality is going to be, how it's going to shake out, but it definitely, it's not a normal day. And I don't want to talk about normal stuff today because of that. And so I stayed up last night and I came up with a list of four skillsets

• 0:45Sam Parr?

  that I've developed in the last 10 or 15 years, maybe longer, 20 years, since I started scheming, since I started trying to create businesses. And I want to talk about those today because in a way, they're kind of like, I kind of think of them as my rock, my recession-proof skillsets. And these things that I'm about to, I'm going to tell you have really changed my life. And I think that if people use them, they're going to be impossible to stop. I think that you're going to be able to make a living no matter what. And I'm going to spend some time talking about these four, these four things that I've learned throughout the years. And I'm going to riff a little bit on them. And I'm going to tell you the resources that I think you can turn to.

• 1:30Sam Parr?

  Most of all of them are free or they're cheap books that you can go and acquire and read. And I think it makes a huge difference. And everything that I'm about to talk about, I've stolen from people that are smart, a lot more successful than I am, that's for sure. And my perspective, I think, is a little bit interesting in that we have this event called HustleCon. And I've hosted about five or six of them at this point. And throughout the years, we've probably have had, I mean, we could have had 40,000 attendees throughout our events. And so we do HustleCon and we do all these other events. And Because I do these events, I get to have all these really powerful and interesting people

• 2:14Sam Parr?

  come and speak. But about an hour, I tell everyone to show up a little bit early. So I get to spend about an hour with them ahead of time, typically privately or with just two of the other speakers, like maybe the one who just spoke and the one who will speak. And I'm able to ask them pretty intimate questions because that's what I do. I like to get the nitty gritty. And so my insight is coming from these people. And I'm talking about like folks that have started these really huge companies or who have accomplished really interesting or amazing things. And it's not just about money, but they're definitely successful if that's how you want to define success. But more importantly, they're successful in terms of just turning dreams into reality.

• 2:56Sam Parr?

  And that's really what I think that this whole business thing is about, which is about dreams into reality. How do you take ideas and how do you shape the world according to those ideas? And it sounds fluffy, but I'm telling you, this shit is really important. And so that's what I'm going to talk about today. Some of these are skills, some of these are mindsets, mindset frameworks, or whatever you want to call it. And so I'm going to talk about these four and I'm going to, I'm going to go through them relatively quickly, but I'm going to add details and stories where I think it's effective. So let's get into it. I've got my notes here. I'm going to be, I just jotted these down in the last few hours. So we're going to go through them. Okay.

• 3:39Sam Parr?

  The first thing that I've learned that's been incredibly effective, and these aren't in order, but this might be the most effective, which is controlling your emotions. And this sounds like some generic advice, but I'm going to walk you through it. We have a lot of companies work out of our office because we've got a lot of space here. And when I started my business, someone let me work out of their office for free. And so we try to kind of do repay that, that, that favor to other people just getting going. And I always meet these really smart people, people who worked at McKinsey or went to Stanford and did all this amazing stuff. And on paper, they are perfect and they are so smart. And I always tell them the same thing, which is this is not an intellectual game. This is an emotional game.

• 4:20Sam Parr?

  Starting a business that is very successful financially, intellectually, it's very easy. Now, maybe being like Elon Musk and starting a company where you send a rocket to Mars. Yeah, that requires a lot of intelligence. But for a lot of companies, like it could be like WeWork or Instacart, these things that are Uber, these things that are really large. They're very simple concepts and they're not that hard to execute. But what's really hard is controlling your emotions. That's incredibly challenging. And what I've learned throughout the years through paying a lot of money for therapy and coaching

• 4:59Sam Parr?

  and reading is that the majority of both good and bad behavior that you have now, it started back in childhood. And so what I tell people and what I've learned and what I tell myself is if you just study your childhood, you're going to learn a lot about why you are reacting to certain things. I remember being a kid, I was only four or five years old. And this is just an example of how things that happen when you're a kid. A lot of times you don't even realize it, but it actually sticks with you. I remember when I was a kid and I was at a, we were at like a bar or restaurant or something with my family and my father was drinking, it must've been like a Jack and Coke or something.

• 5:45Sam Parr?

  And I remember he ordered this glass and I saw him get the straw and take it out. And I was like, why are you doing that dad? I was a little kid and he goes, and he just made some comment, no big deal. He's like, oh, men don't drink with straws. And he didn't even think twice. He was just joking or I don't know. He just said that because he meant like, he was saying like, men don't use like dainty straws when they're drinking alcoholic drinks. And my whole life, I never used a straw. And it wasn't till I was older when I realized, oh, he was, first of all, he was just, he just made some offhand comment, he didn't even think about it. And second of all, he was referring to alcohol. And so for my whole life, when I went to McDonald's or a fast food restaurant as a kid, I would never, I would always pull the straw out of the drink.

• 6:27Sam Parr?

  And that's an example of how little things happen when you're young and sometimes you notice them and sometimes you don't, but they entirely shape how you behave as an adult. And I think it's very important to study your childhood and to study how you were raised, trauma that happened when you're young, because as you grow a company.

• 6:49Sam Parr?

  All of those, all of those things that, that happen to you, they become magnified. So, good things and bad things, both 10x as you get more people and as you get a little bit more successful. And the way you react to things, the way you, the way you gauge risk, the way that you react to people doing what you said, or them not doing what you said, the way you trust people. A lot of that stems from how you were raised and things that happened to you as a kid. And so, what I do is I, I have a therapist. So, I've gone to therapy every week for maybe 10 years and I've had to work through a lot of interesting things. But I think it's quite common that people have the same issues that I have.

• 7:32Sam Parr?

  But going to therapy is incredibly important, or at least it has been for me. And the other thing that I did is I have a CEO coach. That has helped a ton. It's pretty much like therapy, but it's all related to your job. But like, you really talk about all types of relationships, girlfriends, wives, boyfriends, husbands, father, mother. I mean, you talk about all this stuff, coworkers. And so, that has been incredibly helpful for me. And so, the things that have made a massive impact, the resources that, that have made a massive impact are, I use Torch, Torch.io. That's my, that's my coach. We pay him, uh, his name's Peter, we pay him a monthly fee and myself and Adam, the president of our company, go to him. And it's been wonderful. The second thing is, The Body Keeps The Score.

• 8:14Sam Parr?

  It's a great book on dealing with trauma. Now, trauma, a lot of times, people think that means soldiers who are in war and who saw people die and their best friends and they're dealing with PTSD, uh, post-traumatic stress disorder. But the reality is, is a lot of people can go, have that. So, whether you, your parents or your siblings or someone in your life was abusive to you as a kid, or it could be, you just got really scared, you saw something that was pretty wild. It could be, when I lived in Missouri when I grew up, I remember being in, uh, 4th grade and seeing 9/11 and it could be, it's, it's a, could be relatively small, but that made a massive difference on me. And that was a small indicator, or a small example of trauma.

• 8:58Sam Parr?

  And that shapes how you feel. And so what The Body Keeps the Score does is it teaches you how to recognize when you've experienced a little bit of trauma, or a lot of bit of trauma, and how to deal with it. And so that's a great book. And the second thing I like right now is How to Change Your Mind. I don't drink any alcohol. I haven't had a drop of alcohol in eight years. Not a set, not a drop. I don't do drugs. I like, I'm not against drugs. I'm not against weed. In fact, in many regards, I'm in favor of it, but I personally just don't do it because it's never jived well with my personality. That said, I'm incredibly fascinated right now with psychedelics. I have a lot of friends who do microdosing LSD, who do microdosing ketamine.

• 9:38Sam Parr?

  And I'm not an expert on it yet, but How to Change Your Mind is a great book that looks at trauma and how to deal with it, and how a lot of folks are turning to psychedelics, and how that can impact you. And I'm very, very interested in that. And the third thing that I really like when it comes to controlling your emotions is this YouTube channel called School of Life. It's this philosopher named Alan, I think it's Alan de Botten, I think his name is. And he does a really good job of explaining why people feel a certain way and how to deal with that. And I have found his YouTube channel, it's free, to be incredibly impactful on controlling my emotions.

• 10:21Sam Parr?

  And the last thing that I do, this is an exercise. I thought I, this was unique to me, it's not. So I used to do this years ago, and I still do it to this day, and it turns out there's a name to it. It's, it, it, some people call it a negative, a negative thought exercise. I call it looking at the downside. And so what I like to do in order to control my emotions, because the thing with controlling your emotions is you have to control the up and the down. Because when you start a company, or when you start anything, typically you have a fair bit of highs, and the highs are probably as good feeling as you, as you think, or

• 11:06Sam Parr?

  maybe even a little bit less than you think. But the downs are typically way worse than you can imagine. It's really hard to control the downs, because when you start anything,

• 11:20Sam Parr?

  Controlling the down is the hard part. And most people are shocked at how low you can feel when you're starting something, even when things appear to be going well. And so what I like to do is, I like to think in my mind, I'll close my eyes. I do this a lot, a lot of times in the morning. I'll do it at night as well, is I close my eyes and I think, what's the worst possible outcome right now? And so it could be, I get sick, my family gets sick, I'm gonna die. And I visualize what, what that feels like. And if you do it for long enough with your eyes closed, after about five or 10 minutes, you can really feel what that feels like.

• 12:05Sam Parr?

  And then I do two things. I say to myself, alright, that is the worst that can happen. I just experienced it. Anything else that happens today, it is only upside. And it really makes you have a lot of gratitude and appreciate

• 12:23Sam Parr?

  that that hasn't actually happened. And the second thing that I like to do with this exercise is, and this relates particularly to starting a company, or getting a job, or moving somewhere else that's new, and just starting your life, is I try to protect the downside. So for example, if you are gonna start a company, you can ask yourself, well, in order to start this business, I need a little bit of cash. And so you have to be very specific. You have to say, how much cash do I need? Well, right now, I'm spending $3,000 a month. How much, how many months saved do I need in order to feel good about this? And so let's say we come up with a number six. That means I need six times $3,000.

• 13:07Sam Parr?

  I need $18,000 in savings. I'm gonna go out and get that $18,000. Okay, I've got that $18,000. What else is the worst-case scenario here? What's the downside here? Well, I spend all my money and my business goes under. Now, do I want to be homeless? No, I'm not willing to accept being homeless. Okay, so what's the next, so I have to protect myself from being homeless. How would I protect myself from being homeless? Well, I would probably get a job driving Uber because I have a car. Do I want to, am I willing to accept that? No, I'm not willing to accept that, or maybe you are. And then that's the worst case scenario. But the one stage up could be maybe, well, I'll just get a white collar job

• 13:50Sam Parr?

  at a huge corporation, and I'll just be a cog in their big wheel, in their machine. And it won't be fulfilling. It won't be glamorous, but it'll be a really good nine to five with benefits. So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna go and make friends with recruiters at those companies right now, even though this isn't even coming close to hap, it's not happening yet. And so at least at this point, if something ever bad happens, I know that I have a connection at IBM, or I have a connection at Target headquarters, or I have a connection at Intuit, or just the biggest companies in the world. And the likelihood that I can get a job there is relatively high. Am I willing to accept that that is the worst case scenario?

• 14:35Sam Parr?

  Yes, I am willing to accept that. And so what I do is I go up the scale of like, alright, where's the lowest that I'm willing to accept? Now I'm gonna lock that, that, that in as best as I can. So now, anything that happens above this, I am happy, and it is only upside. And so, that's what I like to do, to control my emotions when it comes to taking risk. The second skill that I think is incredibly important, and this is maybe the number one or number two skill. I think, in terms of business, I think it's the number one skill. And so, this skill is copywriting. I think copywriting is the most important skill that you can have for business, and one of the most important skills that you can have in life.

• 15:20Sam Parr?

  And here's why. When you learn how to write well, you learn how to think well. When you learn how to write clearly, you learn how to think clearly. And copywriting is a particular type of writing, but it's not just limited to writing. Copywriting is understanding how people think and how they feel, and how to use the written word, or a script, or spoken word, in order to sell a product, or sell an idea. Basically, how to use words to get people to do what you want them to do. And the way that you do that is you have to understand what motivates them, what makes them work. And so, this can be applied to literally anything.

• 16:03Sam Parr?

  I have made tens of millions of dollars this way, using copywriting, but I've also met my wife this way. I learned when I was trying to meet her, she was way out of my league. And so, I used what I learned in copywriting to get her attention, and make her, or at least try to make her interested in me.

• 16:23Sam Parr?

  Copywriting is incredibly effective. I've used it to get customers, as in people to buy stuff from us, or for The Hustle to get advertisers. I've used it to get speakers to our events. I've used it to recruit people. I've used it to sell people on this interesting idea I have. Copywriting is incredibly important. And it boils down to a bunch of really simple principles, but the easiest one to remember for this conversation is AIDA. A-I-D-A. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. For the majority of your copywriting life, which for most of you, it has nothing to do with getting a job. It's just a good skill set to have in life. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action is the framework that you need. So, when you write, you line it up with: Attention. Can I get your attention?

• 17:08Sam Parr?

  Interest. Can I tell you some facts that get you interested and get you to fall down the slippery slope? Because once I get you to start reading my work, I can get you to keep buying into what I'm saying. And it's really hard to get people to fall down that slope. But interest. Specifically, tell them very interesting facts and features about the story that you just started with, your action point. Or sorry, your attention point. Desire is the second part. So I'm gonna make you desire whatever I'm selling. And I'm gonna get you to desire that by telling you things that you don't know and how this can benefit your life. And then finally, action. I'm gonna tell you specifically how to get you to act.

• 17:49Sam Parr?

  And so here's an example that my friend Neville always uses that I love, which is if I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna try and convince a 15-year-old guy to drink more water. I could say, "Drink more water. It's healthy for you." Or, and a lot of these facts aren't necessarily true because I didn't research what water does for you, but I very easily could use this premise for that. I'm gonna say, "Have you ever seen those guys with huge muscles at the gym carrying around gallons of water in their hand? It's like they use those milk containers to carry water. So that's how I get your attention." You see, they're doing that because if you drink a gallon of water a day,

• 18:29Sam Parr?

  the likelihood that your muscles will grow by 30% more than had you not drank water. Now, the reason that happens, and this is the desire part.

• 18:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah, this is the desire part. The reason that happens is because water has these molecules in them that helps oxygen travel through your blood, and oxygen is needed to build up your muscles. That's my desire part, is I'm trying to show you how to build up your muscles. And when that oxygen goes to your muscles, they grow 30% faster. So, and this is the action part, if you want to build big muscles and be healthier than before, you need to drink about a gallon of water a day per 100 pounds of body weight. So that action part, I specifically explained how to do that. Now, that was just a silly example. I don't, none of that shit's true, but you get the point.

• 19:24Sam Parr?

  This data, it works wonderfully. And I always think that, I always tell people, you gotta learn copywriting, and there's a few great ways to learn it. You can do what I did, which was very labor-intensive and very effective, but it takes a lot of time, and that's called copywork. And so what I did was... I got a hold of the 100 best sales letters of all time. I don't know what makes it the 100 best, but it's just famous sales letters. So in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, before the internet really came around and it even happened after that. But predominantly before that, these salesmen would send these letters to people's homes. And they would try to convince people to get interested in buying a vacuum or an encyclopedia or a pair of sunglasses.

• 20:06Sam Parr?

  And it was typically, they typically wrote to wives. The housewife would take out her checkbook and be like, oh, this is really interesting. I need to buy this. And she would write a check, put it into the envelope and sell it back. That's a lot of friction. And so these people were so good at using words because it was so expensive to send out all these letters. They had to be good. They were so good at using their words that they had to, that they convinced these strangers to write a check and mail it to them.

• 20:33Sam Parr?

  And so I found these 100 letters. And if you Google best sales letters of all time, you're going to find them. And I would, I spent probably six months where I would spend about two or three hours a day. And when I was 22 years old, I would write them all out by hand. I would also do that with books. So The Great Gatsby, Saturday Night Live scripts, I would do it with. Movie scripts, just any piece of great writing I would do that with. And when you do this, it's kind of like how you learn an instrument. The way that we teach people how to play music, it's incredibly effective. So if I hand you a guitar or a piano, I don't say, go ahead, write a song. I tell you, copy the Star Spangled Banner. Go play Jingle Bells. Go look at Jimi Hendrix. Go look at Led Zeppelin.

• 21:18Sam Parr?

  Play all this, all these, copy all these other people. Steal their work for a little while and, or whatever genre you're interested. Go and copy them exactly. And in time, you're going to learn how to feel the texture. You're going to see the patterns that work best.

• 21:36Sam Parr?

  That works extremely well with writing and it's the same concept. I call it copy work. This is how a lot of people used to learn. Our schooling, the way that we do it now, it's changed over the last handful of decades. But for a long time, people used to do this. Ben Franklin was a great writer and he said this is how he learned how to write. And it's really effective. So it's called copy work. The second thing that you can do, and I'm biased. Neville is my good friend, but there's a guy named Neville Medora. And I actually met him because I bought his course. And I bought his course and then after I took his course, I became friends with him. And years later, we became best friends and he was the best man at my wedding. So I love Neville and so I'm biased. But his course is what I took to learn about copywriting.

• 22:21Sam Parr?

  He's got this course called Copywriting Course. It's spelled with a K. Copy with a K and course with a K. I don't know. It's how he stands out. It's a great course. I don't know how much it costs right now. It could cost a few hundred bucks or a hundred. I don't even know. But it's relatively affordable and I think if you don't like it, he'll refund you his money, your money. But anyway, it's a great course. So it teaches a lot of this stuff. It's worth it. It's totally worth it. And I actually think, I used to promote this so much that if you go to copywritingcourse.com/sam, I've got like a referral link and I think there's like a $50 off code or something you could use. So if that interests you, do that. The third thing is this book called Advertising Secrets of the Written Word by Joe Sugarman. It's a great book.

• 23:06Sam Parr?

  It costs $10 and I bet you if you Google it correctly, you can find a free PDF of it online. It's a great book that walks you through copywriting principles and why certain things work and why they don't. And finally, the last thing, it's not a copywriting thing, but it's a writing thing. And it's a book by Stephen King called On Writing. And the first half of the book, it reads really fast. It's only 250 pages, maybe. The first half, it's all about his tools and tricks and his toolbox, he calls it. His toolkit or his toolbox for writing well. And it's incredibly effective. He has got rules like, don't use too many adverbs or keep your sentences short, things like that. It's incredibly effective. It's a great book on writing.

• 23:49Sam Parr?

  The second half of the book is about his biography and it's really, really fascinating. So it's called On Writing by Stephen King. So the second skill set that I wanted to go through, copywriting. I think that because I know how, I would say I'm a pretty good copywriter. I'm a B. Because I am a B copywriter, until the day I die, I will never be homeless. I will always make money. Now, verdict's still out. If I'm gonna be very, very wealthy, but I will bet everything, which I, I am betting everything by starting businesses and things like that, that no matter what happens, I will always be able to make a really good salary, whether as an employee or selling someone else's products.

• 24:32Sam Parr?

  So I think that copywriting is incredibly effective. It's, it's just, it's really useful for your life. Business and just living. Okay, we're gonna go to the third one and the fourth one, and then that's it. The third one, or the third skill set or thing that I've learned in business that pretty much shocked me. I, I really only learned this in last year, but looking back at it, people have told me this forever, which is there's a massive difference, a massive gap in skills, and a lot of people cross it, but there's, the gap exists of starting and managing. So when you start businesses, a lot of people think of Mark Zuckerberg and they're like, this college kid started this thing. He was 20 when he started it. Now he's only 30, or he's, could be 25 still,

• 25:16Sam Parr?

  and he manages 10,000 employees. He hired the, the best people in the world from Princeton and Stanford and Harvard, and he stole people from Amazon, the brightest minds on earth. And you think, yeah, that's just how it goes. Well, managing those people and the business, it's incredibly challenging. And oftentimes, the people who are creative and crazy enough to start companies, a lot of times the skill sets they needed to start it are not only different, but oftentimes opposite of what it takes to run. When you start something, you could look at a lot of spreadsheets and you could kinda like guess your way there, but a lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of times, starting something, it's completely irrational. On paper, things may or may not work.

• 26:00Sam Parr?

  And you just gotta be creative and you gotta do shit and you gotta move fast and you're not gonna have meetings, you're not gonna talk to people about stuff, you're just gonna move quickly and you're gonna execute and you're gonna do it and it's a very creative process, it's almost like creating a piece of art. Like, maybe there's some equation that says like the perfect rectangle looks this way, but every, but a lot of times there's just Picasso who just says, "Fuck it, this is interesting to me, I'm doing this," and sometimes it works. That's kind of what starting a business is, but managing a business is a lot different. And so at our company, I did a pretty good job of getting us to about a million a month in sales, but towards the ends of that, I was breaking, I was doing horrible. I was not good at managing it and I was very unhappy. And so we hired, one of my first hires was this guy named Adam who I went to high school

• 26:43Sam Parr?

  with, and he's now president of our company and he runs a lot of the day-to-day stuff. So I kinda, I kinda, I'm like, he's like sandwiched in the middle, whereas I'm really good at thinking of these really high-level ideas and I'm also really good at going in at the very bottom and just being an individual contributor and creating interesting things. I'm not always great at managing the day-to-day of what's going on. It's, I bet I could get good at it, but it just really doesn't interest me. And that was really hard to learn. And I struggled with this for years. Like I said, I hired a CEO coach, I had, we have a handful of really great angel investors and I kinda talked to them and I'm like, "I don't know what to do here."

• 27:23Sam Parr?

  And it wasn't until I realized that Adam is one of the best at this, he loves this. He's the type of guy who was the captain of the football team, the president of student council, he loves leading people.

• 27:37Sam Parr?

  And it kinda hit me, I'm like, "Man, the way that I sometimes don't understand why people are unwilling to start something or how on earth they're afraid of starting," I am kinda like that on the other end with managing. There's people who, whether it comes naturally to them or they've just worked on this skillset, they're really good at it. And so, in a way, I was wearing this backpack that was full of weight and I hated carrying it on my shoulders, I just took out some of the weight and I put it in Adam's bag and he loves carrying it.

• 28:10Sam Parr?

  And so through this process, I mentioned earlier, we have HustleCon speakers. Through this process, I actually talked to a lot of people at our conferences. And that was one of the major things that I used to ask people, which is, do you have a right-hand man or a right-hand woman? Do you have someone leading the day-to-day? Because I'm struggling with that. How do you do that? And there was typically two answers, which was, "Yeah, I don't like it. It's really hard." And I could sense that these people, I'm talking, I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to call anyone out, but go and just Google HustleCon speakers or something. Look at all the people who we've had at our events, and those, these are, this is the type of person, or those are the people who told me this, which was, they would say like, "I am horrible at managing this."

• 28:55Sam Parr?

  Or oftentimes, they would have like one of their assistants, or like a keeper, or like a handler with them. And I would be like, "Hey, what's this person like as a manager?" And the answers were pretty consistently, "Pretty bad. This person's not good." And so the first answer was, "I'm not good at it. I'm really struggling with it." And a lot of times, those people would say, "I wish I had someone who I could replace myself as CEO." I would hear that all the time. I was shocked by it. And the second answer that I got was, "Yeah, I hired a really good COO, or a really good president, and this is my right-hand woman or right-hand man, and they run a lot of the day-to-day, and it allows me to focus on what I do best." And the people who said number two were way happier, and oftentimes, I think, a lot more successful.

• 29:40Sam Parr?

  Now, there are these rare occasions where the person who started it is just, they're also a great CEO, or a great people manager. That definitely happens. But often, it is not the case. I'm looking at a photo of Ted Turner. Ted Turner is one of my heroes. He was pretty notoriously a bad manager. He was a great leader. People wanted to follow him in the battle. But what he would do is, he would come up with these great ideas. So Ted Turner came up with the idea of CNN, and he launched it. But before that, he had other businesses. And when he came up to CNN, a lot of people think Ted Turner, "You're the guy who started CNN." Well, yeah, he is, but he also, there was another guy named Reese. And Reese was the guy leading the day-to-day. Ted would come- Came up with the idea and then he went away for three months and did a sailing competition.

• 30:24Sam Parr?

  So having these right-hand people are is very important and a lot of times I feel like I'm the right-hand person at this point, but I think that it's really important to understand the difference between starting and managing. I mean, for a long time, it was normal that they would call them gray hairs. It was normal to get a gray-haired leader to come in for a startup. So these young people would come up with this idea for this great tech company and then the investor would say, "All right, let's go hire a CEO." And that is not popular right now, but I think it should be. I think it's actually quite effective. Maybe not CEO, but you definitely need this team of experienced people. And so the reason why I brought this up is it's something that most people I've found struggle with, but there's not a lot of resources out there, not a lot of people talking about it.

• 31:06Sam Parr?

  And so I think it's really important to learn this. Ultimately, this skill set comes down to delegating. And there's four resources that I'll have that I've liked. The first one, I don't like the name of the book, but it's very helpful. It's by a guy named Felix Dennis. Felix Dennis, he was this, he's dead now. He died a few years ago, maybe 10 years ago. He was, he's kind of like Richard Branson, but more vulgar. He was a British entrepreneur. He started Dennis Publishing, which launched Maxim Magazine, which launched a ton of great titles. It's still like a $200 million a year business. He also launched Micro Warehouse, which basically before Amazon was around, it was like Amazon for software and it was a huge multi-billion dollar publicly traded company.

• 31:48Sam Parr?

  So very successful entrepreneur, close to a billionaire. And so this is why I don't mind his book being titled so horribly. It's called How to Get Rich. And the reason why I don't mind it is because he was really successful. He wasn't this like get rich quick guy. And in that book, he does a great job of talking about delegating. And that book, I use it as a reference book. I read all the time about how to work with people. That's my go-to. The second one is I like The One Minute Manager. Just Google it, you'll find it. It's a great book on managing. The third thing is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And so it's a great book that looks at what successful teams and people look like and what they don't look like, more importantly. And so you, in order to, oftentimes, the best way to be good at something is you find out the bad ways of doing it and you Don't do that.

• 32:33Sam Parr?

  And the fourth thing is, one of my investors is this guy named Tucker Max. Tucker Max, if you're a man and you're between the ages of probably 28 and 40, you probably know who Tucker Max is. He was famous because he had this blog called, "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell." And it was very controversial. It was basically about his frat days and he was just this wild party-er and drinker. So he has a really controversial opinion. But after, he's in his 40s now, so he's no longer a kid. But he's really thoughtful at this point. He's kind of turned his image around. And he has a great blog where he, A, talked about firing himself and replacing himself as CEO. And he, it's maybe like a 12-part blog. It's really good. I would highly recommend everyone reading it.

• 33:17Sam Parr?

  And he's one of my investors and he's kind of a mentor to me. You know, him and I are kind of similar in that we try to be macho and, or at least we started that way, of wanting to be macho and show no weakness. But he's actually done a really good job of being introspective and talking about his feelings a lot. And he's done really good about talking about managing people. Tucker also has this great book on how to create, or this great document on how to manage a company. Or like create a culture. And you could Google Tucker Max's culture document and you'll see it. It's free. Okay, the fourth and final skillset that I want people to take away from this rambling is

• 34:00Sam Parr?

  how to influence people. Influ, whether you, I'll call it persuasion or influence. It's very similar to copyrighting, but this one's a little bit more psychological. But it's similar. And what most people don't realize is how to get people to do what you want them to do or how to influence them to think how you think. And that sounds evil, but that's not how I mean it. I mean, you could use it for evil ways. I mean, the stuff that... You convince people to give to a nonprofit, or you convince people of certain morals, or why something's bad and something's good. It's the same stuff that you can use to get people to do a lot of really bad things. And so this is definitely a scary skill set to learn. But if you... But the thing is, is that people are like animals.

• 34:45Sam Parr?

  I mean, in the same way that if you show a dog food, you know, what's that Pavlovian experiment? Where you show a dog food and you ring a bell, so the dog starts associating the bell with the food. And so whenever you ring the bell, he starts slobbering. People are the same way. You can... There's all these little tricks that you can do to get people to say yes to certain things, or get them to buy into certain things more. So for example, if I'm a politician, and I want to put a huge billboard in your front yard, the likelihood that I... of me just knocking on your door and asking to put this big billboard in your yard, the likelihood of you saying yes is pretty low. But if I go in there and I say, "Hey, can I put this small little sticker on your window?"

• 35:28Sam Parr?

  And you... And the likelihood of you saying yes to that is quite high. Now, if I go back a week later and ask you to put this big billboard in your front yard, the likelihood then that you're going to say yes is a lot higher than had I not asked you to put that small sticker, because you're already bought in. And there's about eight or nine principles just like this of getting you to buy into things. So another one's the rule reciprocity. And so what that means is, let's say that I go out of... Or let's say that you go out of town, and you... And I'm your neighbor, and you ask me to check your mail for you when I'm gone. And I say, "Yeah, sure. No problem. I'll check your mail." You... I've just done a favor for you. Now, you owe me a favor. And this is how humans work. We all... We work on favors. And so now, let's say, next week, I go,

• 36:12Sam Parr?

  "Hey, look, I watched... I checked your mail last week. Can I borrow your car for a day?" The likelihood that you're going to say yes is actually a lot higher, because I've already done you a favor. And so the interesting thing about the rule reciprocity is that people pay it back disproportionately, meaning I can do a really small favor for someone, and then I can ask them to do a much bigger favor. And, shockingly, a lot of times, they'll say yes. And so there's about eight or nine of these principles that are incredibly effective for influencing people.

• 36:48Sam Parr?

  Another example, I've used this before. I wanted to go, I went and bought a motorcycle for a guy for three grand, or he was asking three grand for it. And I thought it was, I thought, yeah, I'd be wanting to pay about 2,200 bucks for this. And so I went and bought a can of Coke. I bought two of them. And when I showed up to the place, I opened up one, I started drinking. I go, hey, man, you thirsty? You want a Coke? I was just down the street and I bought one and I thought, maybe you don't want one too. He opened it up and he starts drinking it and I go, "Cool motorcycle, I'll give you 22." And he goes, "Ah, everyone's been offering me that. I'm not gonna do it. But you seem like a nice guy. I'll do it fine." And so, I don't know if the Coke was the reason, but that's just an example of,

• 37:30Sam Parr?

  there's all these little tiny things that if you do them effectively, they kind of add up to be pretty effective. And so, to learn these things, there's this great book by Robert Cialdini called Influence. If you just Google "influence book," you'll see it. His name's Robert Cialdini. Read that. That book changed my life. And the second one, which is pretty famous, a lot of people know it, it's called "How to Win Friends and Influence People." That book, I think that book is one of the best-selling books of all time. The best-selling non-fiction books of all time. It was written in the 1930s, 1920s. It's still 100% effective. So go and read those two books. And I think that if you learn how to influence people, it's really, really, really effective and it will shock you.

• 38:16Sam Parr?

  Now, like, I was a nerd in high school and I liked women and so, I was always just like any other kid. I wanted to go and meet girls. I remember reading this book as a kid. I was like, "I want them to like me. How do I do that?" And so I read this book and I would apply this stuff to meeting girls and it worked. I'm married to an amazing woman and she was way out of my league when I first met her. And she still is out of my league. And I remember I used some of these things when I met her and it helped me kind of get my foot in the door. And so, this stuff will help you make money. It will help you start a company. It will help you balance your emotions or it will help you meet your future spouse. It's incredibly effective. And so, I'm gonna wrap this up.

• 38:57Sam Parr?

  Those are the four skills that I wanted to talk about today. This whole Corona thing, man, it's...

• 39:04Sam Parr?

  It's weird. I didn't want to talk about little business and schemes today, but I wanted to talk about a few things that actually impact your life more than just, more foundational things that can impact your life bigger than just a business. And I don't know, maybe we'll have to call this like the recession-proof skillset, or something like that. But that's it. Let me know how you feel about this. I miss my best bud, Sean, my co-host. He's not here today. So tweet at me, thesampar. Let me know what you thought about this, if you actually made it all the way through. Maybe we'll do more of them. But good luck. Talk to you soon.