Best of This Week: March 18th

Some of the best moments from this week of My First Million. ----- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (01:30) - Recapping Mr. Beast and betting on yourself (07:10) - Kanye West and knowing who you are (12:45) - Andrew Wilkinson and juggling successes ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:13Ben?

  Hello and welcome to My First Million Best of the Week Edition. This has been Wilson. Best of the Week brings you some of the best clips from this week's episodes. No new content, just highlighting some of the great moments we've had over the past few days. We have some great clips for you today. To start off with, we've got Sam and Sean recapping the Mr. Beast interview on Joe Rogan and talking about the power of betting on yourself.

• 0:34Shaan Puri?

  You saw Mr. Beast went on Joe Rogan? I don't know if you caught the episode at all?

• 0:38Sam Parr?

  I didn't. I just a couple of the clips where they said like, what do you do with your money? And he's like, not much. He goes, I used to have a roommate up until recently and we each split our place for $700, but I got a fancier place because someone broke into my house. So I needed like some security, but it's still like pretty normal of a house.

• 0:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I didn't see that. So I've only seen one clip and it was basically the clip of like, how did you make it on YouTube? And it's a great clip, right? Like it's a

• 1:00Sam Parr?

  What's he say?

• 1:01Shaan Puri?

  So he goes, so he's 23 now and he goes, I started doing this when I was 11. And Joe's like, what 11? He's like, yeah, he's like, I came home and I, he's like, I started doing this when I was 11. And he's like, I sucked, obviously at the beginning. He's like, so he's like, he's like, look at me now. I don't look cool now. Like imagine me at like 12, like I was like, you know, pimply, you know, pimply face, scrawny, awkward, mumbly kind of guy. And like, here I am trying to like make videos. And he's like, back then also YouTube really, it wasn't a thing like YouTubers wasn't like a thing 12, 13 years ago, you know? So it's like, he's like, yeah, I just was doing it because I liked it. He goes, I hated school. He's, I never, he's like, in high school, I just never even brought a book home. Like he's like, I remember doing zero studying.

• 1:46Shaan Puri?

  My parents got so mad at me. He's like, and then like when I turned Eighteen, um, he's like, he's like, basically, so his, his went, it went in three phases. He goes, from eleven to thirteen, I was trying to make videos, but I was like, super embarrassed because they were so bad. And Joe's like, do they, do they still exist? He goes, no, I deleted my channel when I turned thirteen because like, I got like, I don't know, like bullied in school a little bit. I felt embarrassed. So I deleted all those videos, but I like started fresh, uh, again at thirteen and like, whatever, it kept going. He's like, so then from thirteen to like seventeen or eighteen, I was just trying to make like videos all the time. Because my first video randomly got like twenty thousand views. He's like, that was the best thing that ever happened to me. I got like this instant hit and I was hooked. And then like, it didn't happen again for a while, but like, that first one, which was

• 2:30Shaan Puri?

  about like, he like hacked some video game, like here, uh, here's how to beat this level in a video game or whatever. He's like some obscure game and it just like, people wanted to know how to do that hack. So that's how I got popular right away. Um, or he's like, that's how that video got popular. And then I got, I wanted to chase that, that, that feeling again. So he's like, I wasn't making any money. He's like, finally I got to the point where I was making a dollar a day. And he's like, yes. And he's like, so I saved up for like a few months and I bought a microphone. And I was like, yeah, like now I sound good. Like, here we go. And he's like, I just kept doing that. I kept like, making a couple bucks, saving it and then like buy a camera or buy like, you know, like a better computer so I could like, edit the videos or screen record or whatever. And so he just kept doing that for like six years. He's like, my whole goal was that by the time I graduate from high school, can I like

• 3:14Shaan Puri?

  just make enough money doing this because I don't want to do anything else?

• 3:17Sam Parr?

  What was his, his number?

• 3:19Shaan Puri?

  So it did not happen. He's like, by the time I, he's like, by the time I graduated high school, I was making like four hundred bucks a month or something like that. And he's like, you know, it's the three hundred, four hundred bucks. He's like, so my mom gave me this ultimatum. She was like, you know, you're moving out or you're like going to community college. Like you're not going to do this video thing. And so he's like, ah, fuck, okay. He's like, I didn't want to go to community college. He's like, it's like the worst thing in the world, just sitting there, listening to this lecture, like it's not what I wanted to do. He's like, so I started skipping. He's like, every day I would just go to my car and instead of going to community college, I would just edit videos in my car. He's like, I do that all day and I come home and my mom thought I went to school. He's like, and he's like, that created a clock. Because now she was gonna find out, like by the end of this semester, I had zeros as my grades.

• 4:03Shaan Puri?

  Like she was gonna know that I did not go to Korea to go outside to like, I bought myself like one semester more of time. He's like, and in that time I pulled it off. Like I got to the point where I could like self sustain. I just moved out and then I could like do this like full time moving on my own. He's like, and so that's kind of like the progression of how I did it. And I was like,

• 4:22Sam Parr?

  How awesome is that?

• 4:24Shaan Puri?

  How awesome is that? Exactly. Like a bet on yourself story where burn the bridge behind you, right? So, so you know, you, uh, we say burn the bridges. I don't know why we say that. It's burn the boats. Uh, like if you want to take the island, you gotta burn the boats. And so he burned the boats when he, when he did that. And, uh, and knew what he wanted to do, right? Cause like school's great, but school's not for everybody. If you, if you kind of know what you want to do, um, you're much better off, I think, competing in the free market on that thing than like competing for your teachers, like love and affection, you know, with writing the essay they want to grade as an A plus, right? Like writing the thing they want you to write about in the format they want you to write in a way that will get them to give you the grade, right?

• 5:07Shaan Puri?

  Like that's like, that's like not a real market. Whereas you make videos on YouTube, you're competing in like a real market. Or you want to be an athlete?

• 5:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah. It's, it's just that most people think that they're like gonna do something for life and they aren't willing to, or they don't actually want to. I think, I think the, the rarity here is not, is someone 18 and capable. It's, do they actually love what they're saying they love enough that they're willing to dedicate 10 or 20 years to it?

• 5:31Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah. Like, you know what I mean? Are you act, do you actually have a thing you love? Uh, most people do not. Uh, my, I remember my sister, when she was going to college, my dad was like, all right, well, like, what do you want to major in? She's like, I don't know. He's like, well, what's your favorite subject? Like, what do you love to study? She's like lunch, like, you know, I just, I'm not, I don't have anything against any of them, but like, do any of them make me happy? Not really. So what, now what? And like, I think that's how most people's careers go. It's like, all right, well, I don't hate it, but I don't love it. But now what? What am I supposed to?

• 6:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So I think that's the rarity here is that he actually, that he liked something enough. Um, but anyway, that's a good story. I'll have to go and watch this podcast.

• 6:10Ben?

  All right. Next up, we've got a segment from the Kanye West episode where Sam and Sean are recapping the new Kanye documentary on Netflix. And by the way, if you haven't listened to that episode, you need to go back and listen to it if for no other reason than to hear Sean's incredible impression of Donda West, Kanye's mom. It's just spot on. It's incredible. But on this clip, they're actually talking about knowing who you are and what you want to do and how that enables you to achieve more.

• 6:34Sam Parr?

  Which, which, by the way, a lot of people forget, do you realize how much he produced before he actually got famous?

• 6:39Shaan Puri?

  No, that's kind of crazy.

• 6:40Sam Parr?

  Artist. It's pretty crazy. Like, the big one was H to the Izzo.

• 6:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:44Sam Parr?

  And there was like, there's like dozens more. I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but there was dozen more where you like, wait, you did that? And he did it before he had his own thing.

• 6:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And he was great at it. And then he's like, he talks about, he's like, yeah, people want my beats. Oh, I want, okay, can I get one? Can I get, I need a beat? Give me a beat. He's like, and then they hear my songs. They're like, yo, I hadn't heard this. Where'd you get this? He goes, that's my shit. I use that for me. And he's like, he's like, trying to like, on one hand, he needs to sell beats to pay for life. But every time he does, it's a step away from where he wants to be in a way, like to be a rapper. And so he's in this hallway and this guy's trying to hype him up because he's like, oh, you got the documentary crew? So he puts his arm around him. It's like the managing director at Rockefeller Records. And he's like, you know, this right here Kanye West, he's the best rapper producer in the game. Best rapper producer in the game, period. And then Kanye's like, kind of like upset. And he's

• 7:35Shaan Puri?

  like, what? And he goes, why you gotta say that, man? It's like saying I'm the best kid rapper in the game. He's like, well, man, I said you're the best rapper producer in the game. He goes, I'm just a rapper. If I'm the 50th best rapper, just say he's the 50th best rapper. Don't call me the best rapper producer in the game. That's whack. All them are whack. I'm not that. I'm a rapper. And like, think about what's going on in that moment, right? He's like, fighting to get a record deal where most people are in desperation mode. Like, they'll take what they can get. And instead, he's got this identity and the whole world is trying to pull him to just be a producer because that's what's in it for them. Like, that's proven. And that helps, you know, helps them make hits. And, you know, why aren't you just happy? Pat you on your head and say you're a great producer. And he had this identity in his head so strong that I think 99 people out

• 8:17Shaan Puri?

  of 100 in his position would just become a producer because the whole world is pulling him in that direction. It was a faster, clearer path to success. And the money was there and the success was there and he didn't have to grind as hard. As he did to try to prove himself as a rapper, but he had it in his head. No, I'm a rapper. And if I'm the 50th best rapper, I'd rather be the 50th best rapper than the best rapper producer. And I just, it was such an example to me of like, people will stay consistent with their identity. And so you kind of got to ask yourself like, what is my identity? Like if I said, Sam, are you, what's your job, Sam? What do you do?

• 8:53Sam Parr?

  Uh, right now, my job is I do podcasts.

• 8:56Shaan Puri?

  If I just say, what, what, like, who are you? What do you do for work? What do you do for a living?

• 8:59Sam Parr?

  I'm a business person.

• 9:01Shaan Puri?

  Okay, you're a business person. So if all of a sudden I, it doesn't matter what HubSpot offers you, right? Like, okay, you're vesting out your deal. You, you, that's great. But let's say any company comes to you and say, Sam, we'd like to make you the vice president of marketing operations at biggest company in the world, and you're going to get this and that. You're not going to do it because it's not consistent with your identity. You're like, I'm a business person.

• 9:21Sam Parr?

  I have to be an entrepreneur, yeah.

• 9:22Shaan Puri?

  So entrepreneur, I can't be an employee if I'm an entrepreneur. There's just not, they're two separate things. And like in the same way, you know, if you're not going to do heroin because you're not, you're somebody who doesn't do heroin. You don't even have to weigh the pros and cons of it. It's just really not a discussion for you. It's not part of who you are. It's not like, I'm trying not to do it. It's no, I just, I don't do that. I do do this and I don't do that. And so those lines you draw for yourself are so important on identity.

• 9:49Sam Parr?

  And I would argue, so there's this book called Forty Laws of Power. Have you read it?

• 9:53Shaan Puri?

  No, but I've heard of it.

• 9:54Sam Parr?

  All right. It's awesome. So he's got this one chapter where he says, you always have to reinvent yourself. And he gives a bunch of examples about that. And the reason why you want to reinvent yourself is the person who you can't peg down typically can become the most powerful. Because there's something about changing yourself that it does a couple of things. First, this whole act as if thing, it's real. So if you like, act like you're going to be an expert artist or something and you work harder, you can eventually become that. But you kind of got to act as if. Second, it kind of reinforces habits. So you say like, no, I'm a healthy person. Therefore I don't do unhealthy things. And third, it gives you this aura of mystery. And people who have mystery surrounding them typically are powerful.

• 10:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:33Sam Parr?

  And, uh, and, and there's a ton of good examples about this, like a really interesting and easy one because she does it so clearly is Lady Gaga. So like oftentimes she'll reinvent herself. So at first she was this like kind of just normal, like white lady playing on the piano. If you see her like when she's a little bit younger, then she becomes like this weirdo person where she like puts meat on her body. Then she transforms and becomes, um, She starts playing jazz with Tony Bennett. You're like, what the heck? Lady Gaga's doing that? What the hell is that? Now she's like, just got done doing some acting and she was a great actor. So like constantly reinventing themselves. I think Arnold Schwarzenegger has done a really good job at that. Where you just, yeah, you just, you've got to reinvent yourself consistently. And Kanye has done that where he's actually changed himself.

• 11:18Sam Parr?

  And I think inventing, reinventing yourself, you actually need to make the decision. You gotta be like, I am this. Now I am this.

• 11:24Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. That's what I'm saying. You gotta choose that identity.

• 11:27Sam Parr?

  And after a while, then you could be like, all right, great. I, that season was, this season had a beginning and a middle, and now it's come to the end. What's the next season of me? And you can actually pick and choose what those inventions are. And I, when I read that, when I was a little bit younger, that kind of changed my perspective on things.

• 11:43Ben?

  Last up, we've got a clip from the Andrew Wilkinson episode. That's another legendary episode. I know I sound like a broken record, but another one you should go back and listen to. And on this one, Andrew, Sam and Sean are talking about why some people are able to have just success after success, hit after hit, and what enables that and what it takes to get to that place.

• 12:01Shaan Puri?

  Andrew, I feel like you've reached this point. And I used to be like, how did these motherfuckers do this? Where I remember I was doing a startup and it was so hard to get my one thing to work. And then I would meet people who were like, oh yeah, so I have that past success. Then I have my current success. And then here's my three side successes that I had this idea and then we just started doing it. And then guess what? The line's out the door. And then this other one, it's like, kind of cool. We just started it, you know, like I accidentally, you know, my hand just fell on my keyboard and I accidentally wrote this app. It was amazing. It went viral. And then this other thing that I just tweeted about, and then this all coming together nicely. And I just remember being like, what? Do they know something I don't know? Is there just like extreme luck component?

• 12:44Shaan Puri?

  And I felt that way for many years, five, six years straight, when I was pushing the boulder up the hill with my startup. And then I now have experienced exactly what the thing that I was most jealous of. And I have no idea what switched in between. Where like the last five things I've tried have all worked and all worked pretty much immediately. And it doesn't matter how big or small, like, you know, whether it's like the podcast or the course or, you know, my e-commerce business or my, the new milk road newsletter business. Like each of these has just worked straight away in a bigger way than anything I'd ever done before.

• 13:20Shaan Puri?

  With less work and less stress than like the old stuff I used to do. And I have no idea what changed. Or I have a kind of an inkling, but I don't really know. Sam, have you ever thought about this? Are you what I'm talking about? And what do you think?

• 13:30Sam Parr?

  I know. I know exactly what you're talking about. And I completely agree. You're on a roll right now. And what's your inkling? I have a feeling of my, my, my, my answer is it's kind of like shitty. It's like a mindset, like abundance attitude and being on, being on offense versus defense. But what's your, what's your, what's your inkling?

• 13:49Shaan Puri?

  So my inkling is that I switched up my situation. So like, I was in one situation for a very long time. Like, and it was a nice situation. It was a very nice situation. But it was like, where I was going to this office every day, working with these people in this hierarchy, with this boundary box of like, what project or projects we can work on, and like, what success might look like. And as soon as I got out of that, and I was just me, I was like, oh, okay. So now that it's just me that I have to look out for, I guess I could just do a podcast. I didn't have to have like, this big venture billion dollar outcome. I didn't have 20 engineers to go tell what to do. I had no engineers. So I just did what I could do with no engineers, which was like, I'll do a podcast, I'll do

• 14:34Shaan Puri?

  a course, I'll do, I'll just try to get big on Twitter. Let's just see what happens. And, oh, you know, like, five tweets go viral, and boom, got 200,000 followers. It's like, there's these things that I just wasn't doing before, because I think before I had a really set thing of like, here's what I need to do. Like, here's the only way to win. And I had like, almost too much ammo. I had like, too many people at my disposal, too much funding, too much everything. And because of that, I had a very narrow window of what could work. And so I was just trying to come up with ideas that might work versus, oh, let me just try this, because I'm, I just kind of want to try it. And then when, once I got into, I just kind of want to try it. And I didn't have it, I didn't have to worry about what other people thought, or I didn't have to come in and manage anybody in that day

• 15:16Shaan Puri?

  and tell them what to do. I didn't have like, investors to go pitch to, I just did the thing. And then all of a sudden, I feel like, you know, sort of like, all the talents that and skills that I had been building up over the past 10 years, like, finally got to just do them.

• 15:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 15:29Andrew Wilkinson?

  Don't you think it's like dating or something though? Where it's like, you know, you date a couple crazy girls and it's really exhilarating. And then over time, you're like, wow, that was horrible. And there's pattern matching. You're like, okay, when I go to a restaurant and a girl's rude to the waiter, that's a no. Right? And in the same way with business, you go, oh, okay. Like, I used to think I wanted to build all these kinds of businesses, but those were 10-foot hurdles. I don't want to jump 10-foot hurdles. I want to jump one-foot hurdles. And so if you think about it, all the stuff you're doing, they're in your, you know, circle of competence and they're relatively simple to execute. They don't require a lot of people. They don't require funding. I think learning that is like a 15-year overnight success kind of thing where it just clicks suddenly.

• 16:12Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 16:12Andrew Wilkinson?

  And I'll catch myself occasionally getting pulled down rabbit trails of like, oh, what if I did this crazy, you know, drone AI startup, whatever. But then I always go back to base hits.

• 16:22Sam Parr?

  And there's this third component of confidence. And so I think that because of like my work, I've been more confident and I understand like, well, if I invest a dollar here, I think I can make at least $3 the next two years. So like just understanding how machines, like money-making machines work, investments. But then also I think Sean, because we get to hang out with, we hang out with each other. We hang out with Andrew, we hang out with our circle of friends. We hang out with all the people we've had speak at our events. We hang out with our podcast guests. It becomes more normal, like succeeding has become far more normal than not succeeding, actually. And not succeeding is just like, oh yeah, it's going to happen. But then you just move on and do the next thing. And it's like, and then inevitably it works. So it's not if, it's, or it's not when, it's if.

• 17:05Sam Parr?

  And I think that confidence has actually helped a ton where, so for example, now if someone wants to like, real estate's an easy one because it's so predictable. But with real estate, you're like, oh man, putting $100,000 down on this house is a lot of money. That's a, you know, that's six figures. It's like, well dude, but it's going to make 12%. It's like, well, I don't know that. And I'm like, yeah, I know, but it's going to do that. So you actually want to invest more. So like that confidence of just knowing the motions and knowing the routine and process has actually helped a lot.

• 17:34Ben?

  All right, that's it for this week. Thanks very much for tuning in and have a great weekend. Bye.