 It's a position that I'm not normally used to. Like, I've been very able to like, been very lucky when say, hey look, we'll invest in this company, we'll probably earn 20, 30% year over year, blah, blah, blah. But here I'm asking for like, literally handouts. Welcome to the revolution of one podcast where the revolution will not only be televised but also individualized. Welcome to the revolution of one podcast. Today's guest is Samir Patel. Samir is a professor, an entrepreneur, and a captain in the Army Reserve. Today we're going to talk about his background experience, starting businesses, what it takes to cultivate the entrepreneurial mindset, what to do when you don't know how to do and how to get started on achieving your dreams. Samir, welcome to the show. Glad to be here. You wanna talk about the power of having good habits. So I've gotta apologize to you man because I was all hyped up about talking to you today and inviting you on the podcast, but I didn't tell you that it was video. No. So you came in here and you had no idea that we were gonna actually be recording this, but you dress for the occasion. So you obviously have a habit of... That's the thing about business. You never know what's gonna happen, especially when you run your own business, you never know what's gonna happen during the day. So I'm always like, try to be prepared as much as possible, even though it's hot as hell outside right now. Like I'm glad I wore the jacket. Yeah, I'm glad too man, you look great. You know Samir, one thing that I thought was really interesting when we talked before is how you've always been one of those guys who just gets after it. If you have a goal, no excuses, just get out there and make it happen. And you've spent most of your life just being that kind of person. And you mentioned how there was this point for you where you realized that most people didn't really think that way. What was that moment for you and how did that have an impact on how you approach things from that point on? Yeah, I mean I guess you could say I was lucky growing up because I was always surrounded by people that went after it themselves. I mean I'm from an immigrant family. And immigrant families typically don't even have a choice to decide what they wanna do in life. They need to make money because rents do every month. They don't have anything to fall back on. So I was always surrounded by people that went after it. But when I started teaching at Georgia State, you do one of those things where you get to know your customer, right? My students are my customer. So I pulled them and I asked them all these various questions about their lives, like who they were, what kind of experiences have they had? Have they even started a business in the past or something like that? And the answers I got back were just very vague. Like a lot of these kids just had no idea of the possibilities and that's why they took the class. Well that's why they were taking the class. And it's so made me realize that not everyone starts off with just even knowing in their mind what's out in front of them. I'm curious, is there an example of a vague answer someone gave you that just kind of blew you away? You couldn't anticipate? Yeah, so like, I mean, one of the questions I ask is, do you have a specific business idea? And my class is entrepreneurial thinking. It's called entrepreneurial thinking for startups, meaning we're probably gonna talk about starting a business and it's an elective course. So it's probably, you took the class probably because you thought you're thinking about starting a business. But at the very least some idea of what you might want to do. Some idea, yeah. And what's surprising is about 30 to 40% of the class replied back that they weren't even sure if starting a business was right for them or not. Which to me was like a paradigm shift because in my mind I've always thought, yeah, I mean, it makes no sense. You have to be, there is no, there is no like, am I in or am I out? It's, the goal has always been to start a business. But for me, when I heard that from students, I realized that not everyone's entrepreneurial, not everyone's been exposed to the ideas of freedom and running a business for themselves. And so, I'm maybe exaggerating the point here a little bit, but it just took me a back that how many students did not realize that entrepreneurship was a path in life for them. Yeah, so first of all, I respect the fact that you can do and teach. You know, I'm a big sports fan. And one of the trends you see in sports is a lot of the greatest performers are not very great at coaching, right? Because sometimes being a great performer can make it even harder because you're just angry at people all the time, like, why are you not so great? If Kobe Bryant tried to coach basketball, he might just be annoyed all the time. Like, why don't you have the work ethic? For you as a teacher, when you're working with people that are just starting at such a different place than you, such a different mindset, what works? What proves a factor? So a lot of it comes from the military, right? And I think to be a successful military officer, you have to be a coach. You have to be a teacher versus like a tactician or a guy that knows exactly what to do at all times. It doesn't work that way because you've got people and you gotta develop them. So from that angle, you know, I simply just ask people, what do they want? And we start there, right? If you can clarify what you want, then as a coach or as a teacher, I can help you figure out ways to get there, right? And asking the questions of what do you want this to look like? And so a typical question I ask, even my students was, hey, the class started last year, right? August 18th, and I said to him, said to them, okay, so it's August 18th, 2018 at the time. What do you want life to look like August 18th, 2019? And I just like make it very, I asked them questions to make it very clear, like what are you wearing on that day? What does your bank account look like on that day? What does your team look like on that day? What does, you know, what does your life look like on that particular day, at that particular hour? Right? Do you have good relationships in your life? Do you have bad relationships still lingering? Do you have a business? Do you have something that you're selling actively, right? Are you on your couch, you know, in your sweatpants? Or are you actually, do you imagine yourself having an interview like we are today, you know, with someone asking you about your journey? So as a coach, you know, trying to get people mobilized about their vision, I asked them that, let's start there with what you want. And then as a coach, I can help fill in the blanks. You know, I think that's a good advice for, many of our viewers are concerned with figuring out, hey, how can I communicate more effectively with people that just don't think clearly about what it means to be free or to live free? And what I like about your approach is you say, hey, don't start with the sermon. Don't start with your own ideas about what you think other people ought to do, yeah. It's about them, it's your customer, right? Like everybody's your customer actually when you're running a business, if you think about it. In fact, I would argue that your employees are maybe your bigger customers than the actual customers that are buying from you. Why is that? Because if you don't empower your employees, I mean, I'm only one guy, right? So take for example, I had a trucking company, we had 55 trucks, 60 drivers in our fleet. And it dawned on me, in the trucking industry, there is a huge shortage of truck drivers. So you gotta take care of them, right? You gotta keep them happy. And they're on the road 12 to 14 hours a day. It's the lonely life as a truck driver. And so I'm relying on them to take precious cargo. Sometimes the cargo's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in and of itself. And I'm trusting these guys to do stuff for me, right? Just like any business owner. You're trusting your people to do stuff for you. And if I'm not taking care of my people, then whatever millions of dollars of revenue we're doing a year can evaporate literally overnight if all my people abandoned me. And so it made me realize that servant leadership or treating my employees and my team as my customers, people that I gotta serve, if I take care of them, they're probably gonna take care of the customer. That's a theme that's come up a lot on this show. This idea that service, it's not just some sort of moral platitude, like be a good person and serve others. But that's the best way to get what you want, helping other people get what they need, caring about them. Yeah, and a lot of business, especially in the startup world, we do this thing called customer discovery. And I teach this in my courses is customer discovery. Like what is it about your customer that at the end of the day is really gonna make them reach into their wallet and pull out money to pay you, right? That's what customer discovery essentially is about at the end of the day. And I realize we do that with our potential customers, right? Like a demographic, women, we're selling purses to or something like that. But we don't do it with our own employees and our own team. And it's like kind of short-sighted of me not to like figure out what my own team wants. You know, like I said before, if I'm not taking care of them and I'm not starting with them in mind, how are they gonna, how can I expect them to go the extra mile and take care of my real customers? Yeah, when you talk about this stuff, it's clear that you have the entrepreneurial gene. Has it always been that way for you? I think so in one regard or another. I mean, I, you know, this question like, are entrepreneurs born or are they made? And I think it's a little bit of both. I think my parents had a huge influence on that because my dad always stressed personal responsibility, you know, and taking ownership of everything that I do. And with that type of upbringing, I think entrepreneurship just becomes the next avenue for that. What was your first business idea or adventure? Five years old, dad had a problem with pine cones in the yard. He gave me a scent, one penny per pine cone that he, that I picked up in the yard. So I was generating revenue pretty early on. Yeah, you got that idea in your mind. If I pick up X amount of pine cones, I love that. I think I got shafted on the number of pine cones, but at least getting paid. But at least he said he put it in my savings account. And then a few years later, like six, seven, eight years old, I used to sell my sister her own toys back. So she'd get like a monopoly game or something at Christmas and I just like, I'm convinced sort of like to buy it again. From me, it turned out to be her own toys. When was the first time you had an idea and you built up enough momentum to where you said, hey, I'm in a position to hire someone now. That did not occur much later on, I think. I mean, and that's probably one of the things that I've had to learn. You know, we're talking about teaching and coaching. Yeah. You know, growing up, I think I was always a singular type of person. I wasn't really good at mobilizing a team. Yeah. And I always saw myself as a free agent. But as I started having more cash flow and things like that on the personal side, and I started investing in actual businesses, the first business I bought was a hotel when I was a junior at West Point. And automatically it's a 72 room hotel. So you have housing staff, you have cleaning staff, you have the front desk staff, general manager and all that. So like I jumped into it at 21 years old with that first hotel acquisition. You know, at FI, I mean, it's the foundation for economic education. So we're talking to high school students, college students, a lot about the economic way of thinking, how you can use that to transform your life. And everywhere I go, there are people that don't see the connection between entrepreneurship and economic empowerment. So my question for you is- I think it's one in the same. It's absolutely one in the same. How so? Because it all boils down to, and what I appreciate about FI and what it teaches, it all boils down to personal responsibility. In this country especially, and I definitely believe that because I put my life on the line to protect it, it all boils down to personal responsibility. If you're willing to take ownership of your experience in life and take responsibility of taking care of yourself plus your family, I think it lends itself to this idea of greater empowerment. That, you know, the beauty of America is that you're allowed to create your life and take care of your life in a way that you see fit, that no one else is dictating it for you. How do you find the balance between taking responsibility for what happens and the fact that there are things that clearly happen to us that we didn't ask for that create suffering? It's all based on mindset. I mean, you have to, at the end of the day, in my mind, I've accepted the reality that life is not fair. And on top of that, I've accepted the reality that I am super lucky as well to be born in this country at the time I've been born with to have people surrounding me that have been a positive influence. But the first and foremost fact is that nothing is entitled, like I accept internally that I'm not entitled to anything. And from there, you know, it's actually liberating. You see this a lot with great achievers where they talk as if it's on me even when it's clearly not. I watched a basketball game where this was when LeBron James played for the Cavaliers and his teammate made a mistake and they lost. And they're asking LeBron about it after the game and he's talking like, oh, it's on me. And everyone's like, yeah, but this other guy made this mistake. And he's like, yeah, but if I would have hit that free throw in the first corner and if I would have did this other thing right, then we wouldn't have even been in that position. And it's sort of like, okay, he didn't have to say that, but when you take that mindset, that's the only mindset that makes it possible to figure out what you can change to get a different result. Yeah, and at the end of the day, especially in business, I mean, it's like, I could have always planned better. Yeah. You know, one of the, I'll tell you a quick story. So, you know, I just sold my trucking business. Congratulations. Thank you. So the outcome was great for me. But then at the same time, I always felt like I left money off the table or left money on the table and I failed to create more value than I probably could have. Yeah. And it dawned on me that I never, first of all, it's my fault, right, that I left money on the table, that I didn't create value. Second of all, I realized that if I just planned better, then I probably would have gotten there. You know, and it translates into the beauty of about America and the internet and email is that you can reach out to anybody. Yeah. You can ask a ton of people and at this day and age, what has been done, what you're trying to do is probably been done by somebody else. Yeah, yeah. Right, and I didn't leverage, I didn't like really build out my board of directors as I should have. And that's just a small example. Like if I had done that, I think get a 20, 30 year old veteran, 20, 30 year veteran in the industry, in the trucking industry in my case and empower them in a board of director position. I think they would have been able to advise me on the steps we could have taken. Yeah. Right? And so I still view it as a failure in one sense that we didn't create the value partially because I didn't plan better. Yeah. That self-ownership, I think I heard, I believe it was Wayne Dyer who said once that responsibility doesn't equal blame. So it's not a matter of saying who's fault is it? When you say I'm responsible, that doesn't mean, hey, it's my fault, I'm gonna condemn myself and wallow in guilt. It means that I am the one who has to make a decision about what I'm gonna do with this. Yeah. It's in my lap. I gotta figure out what I'm gonna do. So let's talk about the process of taking ownership from day one. Our theme for this month is non-zero days and I define that as basically a zero days a day where you do nothing. So a non-zero day is just a day. Well, there's been a lot. Since I sold the company, I've just been sitting. You've got a lot of zero days. Yeah, a lot of non-zero days. Well, I guess maybe the reward of non-zero days is you could afford the luxury, you could get to a place where you could, that's a reward, right? Yeah. Yeah. What's your thought on the idea of small changes? Because a lot of people struggle, they have these big goals and they feel like, I don't know how to get started, you know? What's your take on that? So yeah, I'm writing this book, right? And the book's about my time. We took over the company, I was doing about two and a half million revenue and then we scaled to eight and a half million revenue over two years. And, you know, so I'm writing this book and you know, you asked me about how do people achieve their goals? And I realize actually in the turnaround of that company that before you start adding to your life in order to achieve a goal, it may be best to take stock and take away. What do you mean by that? So like, you're trying to go someplace, right? Yeah. And let's say you have a backpack of tools, relationships, knowledge, and maybe even your own mental stamina in this backpack of yours, right? And you're trying to get to somewhere. I recommend you actually start taking things out of that backpack, such as bad relationships, bad influences, maybe even debt that's holding you back in some respects. Things that are detracting away from you because you can juice anything to reach a goal. But if the DNA, if the conditions are not correct in the beginning, in the very beginning, then you're just amplifying the negativity. So I would recommend you do things that take away the negativity first. So for example, you know, I had this dream to grow this trucking company and the very first thing we did was one, we changed out some of the negative employees that were not holding their own. We changed the culture because it was a culture of gimme, gimme, gimme, not, how can I contribute to the team? It was a culture of folks not like, not taking ownership of the whole business. Basically, team members were saying, that's not my job. Where, you know, that's not my responsibility. I don't manage the trucks, for example. When reality is the culture needs to be, hey, we're in the business of getting goods from point A to point B, right? And there's so many ways we could interact in there. And every team member has a piece of ownership in that, in that process. So those types of things I took away. Like I had to solve some of the debt problems. Like there's no way we're gonna grow the company if our debt service was larger than our monthly cash flow to begin with. So I had to eliminate that. And I went to the creditors and talked to them and we figured out a plan. So I would, the small step is just make a, draw a line on a sheet of paper, right? The positives and the negatives, right? Like what's going for us? What do I have going with me? Love and relationship maybe? You know, I've got some cash in the bank. I've got some experience maybe. And then draw, then write out on the negative column, hey, I've got a lot of debt. I've got this friend that keeps putting me down because I want to start a business but they keep like poo-pooing the idea. Maybe some other naysayers. You know, I've got this really bad spousal or partner relationship. They're not supporting me. And they're like, you know, negatively bringing me down and we've all been there. I've been there. And take steps to remove that stuff out of the negative column first. Let me follow up on that relationship one because you know, if I have a bad habit here or a commitment, I can extricate myself from there. All right, I can say no to that. Take those things out of my bag. Easy. Yeah, but family and friends are a little bit more difficult, right? Super difficult. You got people in your life who maybe they don't get you. They're negative, they're threatened by your dreams. How can you do what you gotta do to be successful without just basically de-forcing yourself from every family member or from your parents or your friends? Like, how do you keep the people in your life but also keep their negativity from adversely affecting you? Yeah, so I'm reminded of this thing Tony Robbins said. I don't know if he actually said it or if he was recounting what someone else had said, but you know, he said that we only do the things that we must do, right? People don't change just because they wanna change. They change because they have to change, right? So going back to this idea of like, you know, imagine yourself a year from now, right? And if we isolated to who are the people in my phone and my favorites on my phone? Who are the people I wanna talk to? If I'm having planning dinner, right, at the end of the week, who do I wanna have dinner with? What does that even look like? And you gotta want it. And you gotta want that vision, whatever vision you paint for yourself, you really gotta want it badly, right? And once you realize the vision you want for your life, let's say a year from now or even six months from now, and you realize what's not in that picture, I think that's, for me it's been very motivating to talk to people saying, hey look, I wanna be here, Joe, John, Johnny, Jane. I wanna be here in a year. And right now I feel like our relationship is not helping me get there for X, Y, Z reasons. Or you don't have to tell them a reason, right? And you just say, look, it's not working. This is not working. I wish our relationship could change. This is where I wanna be. If you can help me get there, I love you and I want you to be there. But if you can't help me get to this vision, where I wanna be in a year or six months or whatever, then can you please just, can we just dial back our relationship? Or can we just not hang out as often or I'm not gonna call you? I don't know what you wanna say, right? Every relationship's different, but you are gonna have to communicate what you want. And the best way to motivate and energize yourself to communicating what you want is by imagining what your situation is gonna be like in the future. And to that point, if people do what they have to, it's if you don't command respect from people, what will incentivize them to do it? If you don't respect yourself, right? You gotta respect yourself enough to say, hey, look, this is what I want. This is the type of vision I want in my life. And hell or high water, I'm gonna do everything I can to make that vision possible, right? And if it's someone, especially some spouses and partners, sometimes, I hate to say it, don't support that. Now, my wife is thankfully very supporting. She may not understand everything that I do, but because I know where I wanna go, I can communicate to her, this is what I want. And that may explain my behavior sometimes. And it's a lot easier for her to support me on that front. But a lot of times, we have parents even, especially for my students, we have parents that have a very clear idea of what they think is right for you, but it's on you to determine the vision you want for yourself. Well, you know, one thing that makes that challenging is that it's easy to confuse dissatisfaction with having standards, right? So if you're doing something that bothers me, you know, what I want is for you to read my mind. I want you to know that it's bothering me. I want you to respond to me whining about it. But the fact that I fold my arms and I pout and I act funny about it, isn't the same thing as drawing a boundary line and saying, hey, like we need to change how we're doing things. And that requires a different kind of leveling up. Yeah, I mean, honestly, you just tell people what you wanna do and say because X, Y, Z, and believe it or not, the Cs will part for you when you just give people a reason. Doesn't have to be a great reason, actually. There was this study that was done, or this experiment, and like there's a long copy line at a university and this psychology professor, he himself like he had like a stack of papers and the first part of the experiment was he wanted to cut the line, he didn't want to wait in line. So he goes up to the very front of the line and says, hey, I've got a big deadline, can I step in front of you? I need to make copies. And like 80% of the people let him cut 15 minutes worth of waiting, basically. Then he said, I would like, then a second part of it, he goes up to the front of the line with another stack of papers and he says, hey, can I step in front of you? I need to make copies. Like, of course you're there to make copies, right? Everyone's there to, standing in line to make copies, but he just said because I need to make copies. And 40% of the time, people let him cut the line. They let him in front. Yeah, just because, he said because I need to do this. Yeah, yeah. And so, and I think that applies to other things in life as well. If you're communicating with somebody because of something you're trying to do, just give them a reason, explain why. And it may not be a great reason, but it's a reason. You know, it's funny, I have my own experience of that. I was reading this blog post one day and it was about the power of asking. And he said, as the challenge I wanna give you for today, the next time you go by something, I don't care where it's from, I want you to ask for a discount. So, my wife and I, we were going to a comedy club that night. We live in LA and you know, the parking there is always terrible. You're always paying for a lot. And so there was this $20 parking lot that we had to go through. And I'm telling my wife about this blog post that I read and I said, I'm gonna ask him for a discount. And she says, you're totally not gonna get that. And so I said, well, I gotta ask. And so I let the woman out. And what do you have to lose? Right, so I pull up and I said, hey, do you guys have a discount? And she's like giggling the whole time, like, oh my gosh, this guy's gonna shut you down. And he says, for you, my friend, $10. And I was like, thanks man, I paid $10. And I drove in and I was like, that's unbelievable. Just by asking, the guy gave me half off. And it doesn't work all the time. But if you develop that consistent habit of saying, I'm gonna speak up for what I want and at least give myself a chance to be a player in the game, you start to see different results over time. Absolutely, I mean, with my own employees, my own team. I mean, sometimes I'm embarrassed for the things I ask them to do for me sometimes. But I just go ahead and do it, right? I mean, what's the worst thing to say? No, I can't do it. I mean, and then I'll ask somebody else, right? The cost is only a few minutes of your time if you think about it. It doesn't cost you anything. If so, if we can get over our own embarrassment, our own sort of friction, you know, our biggest enemy is up here, obviously. That's a cliche, but it is true. Yeah. And so I said, yeah, I agree. Give yourself permission to ask. What's the hardest thing you've ever had to do to either draw a boundary line or to give yourself permission to create something new? Oh, there's so many, it's like a daily basis. So, you know, I'm president of the West Point Society of Atlanta right now, and we're hosting a tailgate in October. And I thought originally 400 people were gonna come to this thing. Max, maybe 500. Right. But this thing now has ballooned up to 1500 people coming. Wow. So it's not like just a three times bigger budget. It's like a five times bigger budget because now I gotta hire security. I gotta hire servers. I gotta hire like a fencing company, you know, for this big tailgate for safety and all this other stuff. And I'm like, before I was able to raise capital from investors because there's like a business, ROI sort of argument I could make, you know. In this case, I'm just asking people to donate for this tailgate, right? And that's, for me, I have to say look, either we fail at this tailgate or we have a chance to make every person in Atlanta know the power of my school, West Point, in this case, right? 1500 people come and it's a huge opportunity. I gotta give myself the permission to like look dumb and say, hey look, we overshot our numbers three times. I need $5,000. Can you sponsor our event for $5,000? Can you give us some money? Can you, like, I mean, it's a position that I'm not normally used to. Like, I've been very able to like, been very lucky when you say, hey look, we'll invest in this company. We'll probably earn 20, 30% year over year, blah, blah, blah. But here I'm asking for like literally handouts. Yeah. Being a captain in the Army Reserves, I know you know as much about discipline as anybody else. And when you wanna talk about like paying the price to be what we wanna be, one of those prices is time. Everybody knows that, you know, maybe they can eat a little healthier or work out a little more or start this new habit, but we all struggle with time, right? We all have family. We all have work and stuff like that. You're a professor, you're an entrepreneur, you are in the Army. How in the world do you find time to sustain discipline? Yeah, so another good book I read, and I can't remember where, but someone said just take out the word discipline and add in skill and replace discipline with the word skill. Break that down for me a little bit. And so like when we hear discipline, we think like burden, right? Like I gotta sit there two hours in front of the car, wax on, wax off, you know, trying to pretend to be Mr. Miyagi, you know, trying to be the next karate kid, right? They think of that when they hear the word discipline. But I cannot remember where I heard it, but someone said just replace it with the word skill. And when I did that, I can't remember, this was a couple of years ago, but when I started doing that, I realized that I'm trying to improve my skill of being able to maximize my output as much as possible. And so that mindset is a mindset of contribution, of doing versus the mindset of discipline to me, right? Is one of burden. Burden, when you feel like, when you have like a burden in your mind, it's very negative and it detracts away from energy. Whereas when you think of, I'm trying to develop my skill and I'm trying to get better every single day with the skill, in my case, management, generally speaking. This is a chance for me to get better. And I'm just gonna keep going and going and going. And I may stumble and I have stumbled, but I'm just gonna keep going and going and going and developing my skill. I like that because when I say you don't have discipline, that kind of lands harshly. It feels like you're saying something bad about me. But when I say you don't have skill, that kind of feels like, yeah. Or your skills are not there yet. Yeah, yeah, I haven't really applied myself yet, but I can get it, you know? So it creates an optimistic frame around not being there yet and it motivates you to do what you gotta do. Yeah, I like that way of thinking about it. You referenced a lot of books. You read a lot? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I love books. In fact, I mean, growing up, my family refused to buy me a video game system. So I had no toys, no video games. And so the only thing that I had pretty much was my own imagination and books. And how much time would you say like a day or an hour you set aside for reading? Probably like hours. Yeah, yeah, several hours a day. Yeah, for someone who said, you know, I wanna live a freer and fuller life, what would be a few recommendations you make? I would say talk to, come up with a vision of what you want life to look like, right? And don't be afraid of if it's not completely clear, but first of all, I would write down in a book, say, hey, look, when I wake up in the morning, I wanna be in this type of bed, right? When I wake up in the morning, I wanna feel this way. And think about why you feel that way, right? Because if you're well to do or you're more successful, you're typically gonna have more and more sleep, and you know, you can delegate things, you're not a stress, things like that. Who am I waking up next to, right? When I look out the window, what do I see? When I log into my bank account, what do I see? When I put on my clothes, when I look at my closet, what do I see? You know, do I see the same clothes or do I see clothes that are better? That I was able to purchase because of better economic success? Anyway, just figure out that vision of what it looks like. And then after that, I think go find people that have lived that life or have that type of experience. Very few things in America have not been tried before, if you think about it. What we're really doing is not that new, with all the enterprises that we have out there, very, very, very few of those types of businesses are new. So you're not really that cutting edge, you just might think. So recognize that fact. Second is go and find the people that have lived that life and talk to them. And then third, read books. I mean, I'm a big believer in standing on the shoulders of giants, as Warren Buffett has said. And I find the giants and I just, I sort of impose myself on them to extract whatever knowledge and nuggets I can out of them. I like how you keep coming back to the goals too. Like instead of starting with the books and saying, oh, here are the things that every ambitious person should read. You're like, nope, what do you want? Everything you do has to be nested inside of what you want. Otherwise, it's not gonna have meaning. Right, so like I know where I wanna be, right? Let's say in my case, five years, I wanna have a much bigger company. I want a lot of employees. And I wanna be, and I wanna teach, right? That's my five year vision to teach more frequently. And I don't even have a master's degree. So like, now I'm going to get a master's degree because I know I wanna teach. It's not that I wanna get a master's degree because I think it may open up a lot of doors. Like, I kinda, it's the opposite. You knew at a very early age that you wanted to be an entrepreneur. What about people who don't know what they want? The person that says, yeah, this all sounds great for you, but I don't even know what I like. I don't even know what I want. I would just say go out and put yourself through as many experiences as possible, right? Join clubs, join a hiking group, join whatever, like read books if you want, but put yourself, give yourself the gift of as many experiences as you want, especially experiences that make you feel uncomfortable. And through that process, you'll start to distill what type of person you wanna be. And entrepreneurship is not for everybody, right? Like the risks that I take, and sometimes I live and die by the balance sheet. And sometimes the businesses can be, kinda like evaporate from me overnight, in some instances. And so I'm all about just understanding myself and making myself as uncomfortable as possible. I'm like, look, I don't want everyone, after going through, I don't wanna do that, right? Like this whole nonprofit thing of raising money from people, super uncomfortable for me to ask for money with no discernible ROI on it. I don't think I'm gonna be in the nonprofit world after this interview, or after this tailgate. I don't know, but I was uncomfortable and I was willing to give myself permission to fail to go out and have that experience. Same thing goes for younger people, especially. Yeah, and we probably should add to that too. Don't be afraid of making the wrong decision. I mean, clearly there are legal and moral parameters within which you wanna operate, but just try something new. You don't have to know that you're passionate about it, yeah, out of time. Arnold Schwarzenegger says like, break the rules, but don't break the law, right? So break the rules, obviously don't break the law. And there are a lot of rules that we kind of self-impose up here. And don't be afraid of looking like an idiot. Yeah, that's a big one. Big part of the revolution of one philosophy is that personal development has political implication. And most people, when they think about their personal power, they think about it in the sense of I have the power to go to the voting booth and put the right person in office. And if we get the wrong person in office, my only option is to kind of be angry about it for four years until we get the next person in. And I'm pushing for a way of looking at the world that says no, your decision to go to the gym or read a book or do something to make yourself better has as much of an impact as what you do at the voting booth. I like to hear your two cents on that. Yeah, I'm a firm believer in living by example. And honestly, if you think about it, like who you vote for for the president of the United States has very little, for most people, has very little to do with your life here in Atlanta, Georgia, or in Norcross. In fact, you would probably think the city council of Gwinnett County or of Norcross may be more important to you than who the president of the United States is. And that's not just an attitude. That's an empirical fact. Yeah, it is, right? And so the voting booth matters on some really big issues. But outside of that, if I'm not a good person, I'm not helping people around me, then that example is not spread to others. I mean, I myself am a product of a lot of really good people who are generous with their time, who showed me what right looks like, and all that. And if they didn't live that type of life, then I guarantee you I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you dressed in a nice jacket. It would not be possible at all. Well, I appreciate you making that choice and sitting here talking with me has been great and hearing about your story and your insights, man. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, love what he's doing. Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks. Once again, our guest today is Samir Patel. Thanks for watching the show. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash fee online. 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