This Video Will Find You When You Need It The Most

Today’s episode breaks down why failure is the entrance fee for success, how three seemingly ordinary entrepreneurs rewired their brains to look for possibilities before problems, and the exact mindset that separates people who build billion dollar companies from people who stay stuck wishing. In this episode, you'll learn: The “Unlucky One” principle Why James Dyson went through 5,127 failures over five years How Ole Kirk Christensen fought bad luck, misfortune, and catastrophe on his path to build Lego How Jack Ma failed his way to becoming a billionaire Jensen Huang’s pain and suffering framework Why Sara Blakely's father celebrated her failures at the dinner table ___________ (00:00:00) Introduction: What If It All Works Out?(00:00:25) The Realistic Trap: Why Pessimism Disguises Itself as Practicality(00:01:22) The Failure: James Dyson's 5,127 Prototypes(00:03:14) Hiring Graduates Over Veterans: The No Fear Advantage(00:03:54) Man Is Meant to Be Humbled: The Mike Tyson Principle(00:04:40) The Unlucky One: Ole Kirk Christiansen and the Birth of LEGO(00:07:19) The Obstacle Becomes the Way: Marcus Aurelius on Adversity(00:07:53) Cody's Recent Failures: The $80K Recruiter and the $50K Studio(00:09:04) Jensen Huang on Pain and Suffering: The Character Builder(00:11:28) The Reject: Jack Ma's 30 Rejections Before Alibaba(00:13:40) The Six-Minute Meeting: When Unstoppable Meets Opportunity(00:14:32) Rejections Are Just Reps: Reframing Failure as Practice(00:15:13) Sara Blakely's Dinner Table: Celebrating Failure as a Family Ritual(00:16:31) Closing: I Want to Give You Pain and Suffering ___________ MORE FROM BIGDEAL 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@podcastbigdeal 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigdeal.podcast 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@big.deal.pod MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@codiesanchezct 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codiesanchez 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realcodiesanchez OTHER THINGS WE DO 🌐 Our community: https://contrarianthinking.typeform.com/to/WBztXXID 📰 Free newsletter: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3XWLlZp 📚 Biz buying course: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3NhjGgN 🏠 Resibrands: https://resibrands.com/ 💰 CT Capital: https://contrarianthinking.biz/4eRyGOk 🏦 Main St Hold Co: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3YfGa8u Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Codie Sanchez?

  I want you to close your eyes and just ask yourself one question. What if it all works out? Like, what if you actually are able to achieve that big giant thing that you want to do? You follow through this time and you don't quit before you even start? That is what this episode today is about and I'm not going to waste a second because you shouldn't either. This is the Big Deal Podcast. I'm Cody Sanchez. Let's get into it.

• 0:55Codie Sanchez?

  I got amped thinking about this because I was talking to Robert Greene and I think one of the reasons you don't achieve the things you want out of life is because other people tell you to be realistic, which is maybe one of the worst lines in the human language. Like, how many times have you heard that phrase? Be realistic applied towards the things you actually achieved in life? I think it's mid-speak for be pessimistic, don't take risk, you're probably going to fail. And, you know, I failed a lot. Like, you know, I built multiple nine-figure businesses. And I think my baseline for realistic has to be optimistic in order for us to do anything big. I have to have this unhinged belief, which you have to have too, that you will eventually succeed. And as you're about to hear from the stories of these three entrepreneurs that I pulled together

• 1:40Codie Sanchez?

  that I want you to think about today, is that these three seemingly ordinary people are going to rewire your brain to look for possibilities before they look for all the reasons why something won't work in the world. Okay, the first story is about what we're calling the quote-unquote "failure." So I don't know if you guys know James Dyson, but Dyson is a company that makes those crazy-looking vacuums and they made like Airblade hand dryers, a whole bunch of crazy consumer electronics. So you might not know that James Dyson, the founder, went through 5,127, I believe, failures and basically had one success over five years prototyping the bagless vacuum cleaner.

• 2:22Codie Sanchez?

  And what's fascinating about that is like even the ones that he got to work were basically too fragile for the market, too expensive, uh, that couldn't be made. But he would just not quit. And so he basically finally sells one, two years in, but he was never able to raise a penny for this company in the beginning. And that meant that he still owns almost 100% of the company. And that ownership stake has made him a billionaire, the guy who made vacuums. And probably propelled him past the point that most people would quit. And so I think one of the reasons that I bring this up is like, do you have enough failures for the success that you say you want in life?

• 3:06Codie Sanchez?

  And I think the answer is probably no. I think you probably haven't failed enough for the success that you say that you want. And that anybody who is doing big things out there in the world knows you're failing almost constantly to the point where you don't even think about it. I mean, if any given week, we're making a mistake in one of my businesses that is costing me tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions of dollars every single week. And if I was at all precious about that, I wouldn't be as successful as I was today. So what's your version of that? And I think, you know, Dyson is interesting because this is woven into his entire company. I actually want you to listen to this clip about why he hires graduates instead of veteran engineers.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  I try to always employ graduates because they have no fear, they have no experience. I don't want experience. I want people who haven't done something before and want to find a new and better way of doing it and who have no fear of failure. Because failure is so important. I mean, it's what you learn from it. If you, if you always succeed and always give the right answer, you're learning nothing.

• 4:06Codie Sanchez?

  Right.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  So I want people who feel as though they're pioneering and want to do something in a different and better way.

• 4:11Codie Sanchez?

  If you keep asking yourself, what happens if it all works out? You're just going to keep moving forward progress on the things you want to do in your life. Because you're going to be like, what if this next thing works? What if this next thing works? So you're going to keep pushing past the point that is reasonable. You know, Mike Tyson has a great quote. He basically said, "Man is not meant to be humble. He is meant to be humbled." That's from one of the greatest of all times, right? Getting actually punched in the face. And so the question you need to keep asking yourself is like, what if it all works out? So if we think about, you know, James Dyson as the failure, the next one, and maybe you feel like a failure. I feel, I've felt like a failure many times in life. In fact, like even right now, in this moment, I have this big hairy problem in one of my businesses that I literally cannot figure out how to solve.

• 4:56Codie Sanchez?

  It's like kept me up a lot of sleepless nights. I'm trying to work through the problem, trying to stay confident, but like I could fail at this portion. And the only thing that's keeping me going is like, what if it works out? And how do I figure this out? And that we probably will one day. So the next person I want to talk to you about is the unlucky one. He's actually the creator of Lego, you know, the little building blocks. So his name was Ole Kirk Christiansen. He's Danish. And he was a carpenter and his journey to create Lego took decades. Like at, in 1916, he was 24 years old. He bought an existing carpentry shop in his town. And what's fascinating is he was just doing like normal stuff, doors, you know, tables, whatever. Then in 1924, so what is that?

• 5:40Codie Sanchez?

  That's almost 10 years later. His business burns to the ground and so does his house. What did he do? He rebuilt it. He took on a bunch of debt. By 1932, the Great Depression then crushed his business again. And that same year, his wife died. Then what does he do? He starts making wooden toys to keep the business alive. Then in 1942, disaster struck again. His factory burned to the ground, destroyed most of his life's work. So what did he do? He rebuilt, he rebuilt again. And this time, his toy business took off. And so he made a huge bet. He invested in an inexpen, in a, he invested in a really expensive plastic injection molding machine when plastic toys were still like a crazy idea.

• 6:25Codie Sanchez?

  That wasn't anything done. Wood was normal. By 1949, so this happened in 1942. By 1949, Lego was selling its first plastic building bricks, but nobody really wanted them. And so Lego made all these bricks. They kept approving, improving the product, but they were like really failing at getting anybody to pick it up. Retailers were just not interested in it. Takes all the way forward, almost another 10 years, 1958. Ole's son developed a design that gave Legos those locking together, you know, qualities. We know about them today. They filed a patent. Six weeks later, Ole died at 66 years old. So I want to take this back for a second.

• 7:06Codie Sanchez?

  Took 12 years from the day Ole bought his workshop to the day he sold his first toy. 17 years after that to create the first plastic Lego brick. Nine years after that to create the final design that was patented. And then another decade plus before Lego became a household name. So like he spent decades failing and not giving up to create an empire that now his entire family has benefited from. By the time he died, Lego had grown from a struggling carpentry shop into a company with 140 employees and international success. Today, they have 25,000 employees and did $13 billion in revenue last year. They also are supposedly one of the happiest companies in his country. You know, Marcus Aurelius has an amazing quote, actually.

• 7:51Codie Sanchez?

  He says, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." And I love this because if you think about it, like that's true. Whatever it is that you don't want to do right now becomes the thing that you have to do. And there's no way that Ole would have had this really successful multinational, multi-billion dollar company if he could have just stayed small and done wooden carpentry and not had something burned down and not have to keep iterating. And so does life happen for you or to you? You know, it reminds me today, I was writing about all the things that I have failed at in business of late.

• 8:30Codie Sanchez?

  Like, we hired a recruiter. It was $80,000 to hire somebody and that hire ended up failing. Cut our like close rate in half for one of the businesses. That person probably cost us millions of dollars in potential sales. Like, uh, we had another video we spent 10K on that just sort of flopped. I was even thinking about with the podcast, we built this like sick podcast studio at the other location. Now we have a new headquarters. It doesn't fit in this location. Probably cost me like 50K to build out the podcast studio. It's like all these little fails again and again. First of all, to Cody, when she first graduated and only made $37,000 a year, a $50,000 podcast build out, it sounds nutty.

• 9:12Codie Sanchez?

  You know, um, losing $80,000 just finding a person, not even the hundreds of thousands of dollars I paid this guy, probably sounds funny, but I kind of go back to that Michael Jordan quote, which is, "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I failed over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed." I go back to like some of the greats from today too. You know, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, speaking at Stanford, talking to a bunch of Stanford diplomas and watch what he says about pain and suffering.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  I have very low expectations.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  And, and, and I mean that. Most of, most of the Stanford graduates have very high expectations. And you deserve to have high expectations because you came from a great school. You were very successful. You're top of your, top of your class. Obviously you were able to pay for tuition. And, and, uh, and then you're graduating from one of the finest institutions on the planet. You're surrounded by other kids that are just incredible. You should have very, you naturally have very high expectations. People with very high expectations have very low resilience.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  And unfortunately, resilience matters in success.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  I don't know how to teach it to you, except for I hope suffering happens to you. And, and I, I was fortunate that I grew up with a, with a, with, you know, with my parents

• 10:56Speaker 03

  providing a condition for us to be successful on the one hand, but there were plenty of, plenty of opportunities for setbacks and suffering and, you know, and, and to this day, I use the word, the phrase pain and suffering inside our company with great glee. And the reason, and I mean that, you know, boy, this is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering. And I mean that in a happy way because, because you want to train, you want to refine the character of your company. You want, you want greatness out of them. And greatness is not intelligence, as you know, greatness comes from character and character isn't, is informed out of smart people. It's formed out of people who suffered. And, and so, so that's, that's kind of, and so if I could, if I could wish upon you,

• 11:40Speaker 03

  I don't know how to do it, but you know, for all of you Stanford students, I, I wish upon you, you know, ample doses of pain and suffering.

• 11:50Codie Sanchez?

  I think the dots always connect if you allow it enough time and consistency in order for you to see the pattern on the page. Now, the last story I want to talk to you about is the reject. So his name is Jack Ma. Jack Ma founded this company called Alibaba. You guys have heard of that, right? So when it IPO'd in 2024, it raised about $25 billion. It was the, the biggest IPO in history at that time. But let me tell you how you got there. If you don't know that, if you only saw him on stage, you might not think all these other things, but he actually, this is almost impressive. He failed his elementary school exams twice. He failed his middle school exam three times. He scored one out

• 12:30Codie Sanchez?

  of 120 in math on Chinese college entrance exams. And then he failed it again because once wasn't enough. Then he scrapes by in what he calls the worst school in his city, but only because the English department was short on applicants and they bumped up rejects. He was rejected by Harvard, how many times? 10. And then he went looking for a job and was rejected on his first 30 applications. In fact, this is wild. KFC opened in his hometown, 24 people applied, 23 people got hired. Guess who did it? Jack Ma. The guy rejected.

• 13:10Codie Sanchez?

  He applies to, to even become a police officer. Three other guys get, uh, there's four dudes that apply, three other guys get in, he doesn't. So like, at what point would you have just given up? I don't know, played a small life? What if he had just ended up at KFC, right? Instead of a multi, multi billionaire? And so then he ends up in 1995, he saw the internet for the first time in Seattle and was like, wait a second, there's this, going to be this thing called e-commerce. I believe in this. It's happening in the US. It's happening in Seattle. So he came home and he said, let's bring this to China. Started one of the internets, China's first internet companies. And then the rejection starts all over again. Every

• 13:51Codie Sanchez?

  investor, every person he pitched was like, this is a scam. This is ludicrous. What are you talking about? So he started videotaping himself explaining the internet. So he'd have proof he hadn't invented the entire thing. And then somehow he managed to build that into a company that was worth billions and billions. You know, he, he pitched 30, I believe, venture capitalists and, and got turned down by every single one until actually Goldman Sachs wrote a $5 million check. And that now turned into the legendary investor, Masayoshi Son, who handed him 20 million bucks. And that meeting with Masha, uh, Masa lasted only six minutes because by the time Jack was there, he was like unstoppable, right? He's

• 14:36Codie Sanchez?

  like, tell me to, tell me I'm going to fail again. Tell me I'm going to fail again. I'm going to keep going. And three years later, uh, Jack Ma's new company Alibaba made his first dollar of profit. And so like, I look at these dots that you could connect and it's like, what if it all just works out? Maybe exactly how it's supposed to. Maybe the thing in front of you failing is not that big of a deal, actually. And those disadvantages are actually the advantages you're waiting for in your life. And so, you know, if James Dyson had to fail 5,000 times and Ole had to have his factory burned down twice and Jack Ma had to get rejected from like every job available in all of China, then like, why do you think you and I are going to be any different? Right? Like rejections are

• 15:20Codie Sanchez?

  probably just reps. They're just the 9,000 shots that Michael Jordan has taken, you know, the 300 games that he's lost. It's hard to internalize this when you're going through it. You know, I'm there right now. You can just stay up and think about all the things that are difficult in your life right now. Sometimes when you pull back and you think, hey, those aren't failures. Those are just dots that weren't supposed to be connected. Then things get a little bit easier. And I want to leave you with like a short video of an incredible entrepreneur who's also a billionaire. And I've been privileged to get to know her husband, Jesse Idsler. And this is Sarah Blankley, the founder's face. I want to listen, you'll listen to how she defines failure.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  Growing up, my father used to ask my brother and me what we had failed at, at the dinner table, which was so interesting. And he'd celebrate it and he'd actually be disappointed if I didn't have something that I failed at that week. So I can remember saying, Dad, Dad, I tried out for this and I was horrible. And he would actually high five me and say, congratulations, way to go. And what it did was just reframe my definition of failure. Failure for me became not trying versus the outcome. So, so many people don't take risks for fear of failure. They don't start the business. They don't go create the art they want to create, or they don't go try out to be in the play or whatever it is for the fear of failure. And once you redefine that for yourself and realize the

• 16:40Speaker 04

  failure is just not trying, then life opens up to you in many ways. And I would also, my dad would encourage me anytime something didn't go the way I expected it to, or maybe I got embarrassed by a situation to write down where, where the hidden gifts were and what I got out of it. And I started realizing in everything, there was some amazing nugget that I wouldn't have wanted to pass up.

• 17:01Codie Sanchez?

  So here's what I want to leave you with. I actually don't want to give you more comfort. I don't want to give you winning. I don't want to give you positive affirmations. I want to give you a little pain and suffering and failure because I think that might be exactly what you need to get to the spot you truly want to go to. My name is Cody Sanchez. This is the Big Deal Podcast and I'll see you next week.

• 17:28Speaker 05

  Hey, Bose here. On your next track, listen for the decisions. Distortion on the bass, the vocal right up front. Every choice deliberate. With Bose, you'll hear it all. Your music deserves Bose.