 So I'm here to talk about entrepreneurship little just few few minutes about me I'm Really kind of a nomadic seeker in a lot of ways I was a heavy metal guitar player and a metal Smith and a jewelry maker and then a real estate agent and a bunch of other Things in between there and for a while I was a heavy metal guitar playing metal Smith and real estate agent all at the same time That didn't work out too well I Went on to become a dating guru a teacher of entrepreneurship An investor in technology companies So I have a kind of broad Range of experiences that I'm bringing here as I talk about these patterns that I'm going to talk about I've been teaching entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship now for about eight years formally Taught tens of thousands of entrepreneurs all around the world and topics like Creativity and productivity and product and marketing and growing businesses I've built ten brands and businesses over a million dollars Four of them over ten million dollars myself in my own world. I've invested in slash advised Four or five companies over the last seven years or so So far all of them are successful in growing so knock on wood so as I as I went to work studying entrepreneurship and kind of the code I feel like I've Feel like I've recognized some patterns that that really makes sense to me and make sense to a lot of other folks And I guess you know really like a lot of folks that do this kind of thing I'm you know, I'm a hacker. I'm a meta learner. I'm someone who's trying to find the meta patterns behind What helps us achieve and create the results that we want in our lives? One of the observations that I have is that I think that entrepreneurs are really the superheroes of the future And that's who they're becoming if you even look at You know the movies if you look at Tony Stark who's you know iron man who's an old comic book character There's a whole side of his identity That's an entrepreneur and most people know that in a lot of ways He was modeled on Elon Musk And if you look at people like Mark Zuckerberg and the Google guys and some of these other You know young people that are starting businesses and then selling them all of a sudden young people today are Looking away from you know cultural icons and sex symbols and things and they're looking at entrepreneurship and saying That is what I want to be And so I think that in the future as entrepreneurs, we're going to become role models and Real figureheads for you know a new movement and we have to start thinking that way We have to start behaving like role models and realizing that what we do other people will imitate and they'll follow another thing about entrepreneurship is that the entrepreneur path to success Essentially striking out on your own and starting a new thing It's relative still relatively new in the zeitgeist for most of us It's kind of the way things are but for the rest of the world. It's still a new idea and it's still a relatively new word Okay, there's some people in this room if you said, you know, what do you do at a party? They will say I'm an entrepreneur, but most people who are entrepreneurs still wouldn't answer I'm an entrepreneur most people still don't identify as an entrepreneur And so again for us it's kind of normal, but for the rest of the world and so many people who are potential entrepreneurs It it still isn't It's not a potential path for them. It's not a word that they use It's not a self image that they have and so I just want to recommend that we use the word entrepreneur And we keep using that word Because it's you know, it's normal to us, but it's new for most people a few definitions of entrepreneurship I've learned from Ken Wilber multiple definitions are useful to have so anytime you have an important concept Look for at least three to five definitions, you know, seven or more if you really want to get You know a faceted kind of multi-dimensional idea for something. Okay, so the word entrepreneur is a French word Originally meant to undertake something Okay, so entrepreneur more literal and in interpretation was to undertake Then it became used to describe someone that was a manager of a business kind of like a you know, general manager of a business and and only then Did it Jean Baptiste say he he had a definition which I'm paraphrasing here Which is an entrepreneur is someone that takes resources from a lower level of productivity To a higher level of productivity that's kind of in essence and my simple definition of an entrepreneur is someone who builds a profitable business A lot of people have started businesses and they consider themselves to be entrepreneurial, but none of them ever went anywhere so I can't really give someone the rubber stamp that you're a successful entrepreneur until you've Launched a business and it makes profit which would be defined as Producing more value than it consumes and traditionally up to this point. That's been measured in money and I think we're becoming more sophisticated now as humans and Just in a lot of ways starting to think of this in a more evolved way But that skill of building a business that produces more value than it consumes when you can do that Especially after you do it two or three times you learn embodied, you know kind of Imprinted lessons that make you so much more powerful orders of magnitude more powerful when you then come back and want to contribute to make a difference So I said produce more value than consume So an important question that I recommend that we all ask ourselves is what is value? What is value? I think that's one of those ones that's worth writing on a little post it and putting on your You know your monitor or putting next to your desk and just thinking about for a few months What is value and really asking your customers asking your partners asking other people around you and If you say what is value that maybe is a little too abstract But just asking what is your biggest fear of frustration or what worries you? What is your biggest desire? What's the outcome? You know, how would things look if they were perfect for you and just really tuning into What are people afraid of what are they fearing and worrying about and what are they desire and We can never ask and in my experience so far. We can never ask those questions too much They they're never they never get old we can ask our partners We can ask our families we can ask our customers We can ask the people we work with and we can keep doing it for years and decades and just get deeper more profound answers So what is value? I asked my good friend and mentor why it would small this question when I was you know several years ago when I was really Trying to wrap my brain around value itself and incentives and he said well ebbin If you know why that's a pretty good interpretation. I said well ebbin Value is a nominalization It's an abstract noun. It's basically a process of To value something that's been then turned into this frozen static thing So what we have to do what you do in neurolinguistic programming is you denominalize it So you take this word value which again is a kind of frozen dead abstract noun and you turn it back into a process So you ask what does it mean to value something and So when I when I say what is value what we're really asking ourselves is what is the process? What is the process that human beings go through to apply value to something for it to become something that they want or something? They want to avoid and then how do they have those experiences physically emotionally psychologically and Getting inside of that world and really empathizing with another person again It it creates a lot of insight that you can use in your business But it's also great practice for building relationship with other human beings one of the more important Fundamentals that I've learned in terms of succeeding as an entrepreneur is what I call the critical counter-intuitive and The essence is that the next step on our path to success in entrepreneurship, but also anywhere else in life is usually not obvious and It's often counter-intuitive Meaning it's counter to what we would intuitively or naturally do in that situation When I was younger I remember going to the carnival with a girlfriend and they had this game and You know the carnival games and the there's always a trick to them It looks so easy and then you try to throw the ball or play it and you can't make it happen Well, this was a game and it it was it looked pretty simple It had this spiral of wire That was maybe a foot tall and it was maybe coiled five times and then had this little Loop of wire and then these two handles on it Anyone's seen this game know what I'm talking about? Okay, so the objective is you take the two handles and it's got a circle in the middle like a loop and you have to run this Loop down and around this coil of wire without touching the edges And if the the two if the metal touches it goes Bzzz and you lose and so you watch the carney behind the thing just with one hand just Go down the loop and then get to the bottom and touch the bottom and then win and you say I could do that And then you give them your whatever five or ten bucks and you go all the way down to the bottom And then you get mixed up and you go Bzzz and you get that feeling of I just you know got taken Well being a glutton for punishment You know I stood there for hours and I just watched them do it and I watched people lose their money And I watched them do it and what I realized was that at the end is you've got this thing with these two handles And you're going all the way to the end There's a it's a little more complex, but there's a little thing attached to it and you everyone turns it one Direction when they get to the bottom It's the intuitive way to turn this thing to go But it turns out when you turn it the intuitive way you get stuck and it traps you and you lose the game And so what you have to do when you get to the bottom is you have to turn it this counter intuitive way You have to go the opposite way that would make sense And so I just stood there watching it and then closing my eyes and imagine doing it And then I gave him my five bucks again, and I won Because I realized that there was a trick to it. There was something that I had to do that wasn't intuitive in my late 20s after Having a very challenging and frustrating life with the opposite sex You know girls didn't like that's my wife laughing interestingly enough It's called the laugh of unconscious agreement I Finally decided okay, you know girls didn't talk to me in high school or middle school And I never got notes and I never had a girlfriend and so finally my late 20s I decided okay I'm gonna figure this thing out and I read all the books and I went to all the seminar like You know I really geeked out on this for a couple of years And the big breakthrough came was when I made friends with guys who were really just naturally good at attracting women And this was an interesting group I mean I had a next-door neighbor who was a stockbroker or this young guy and I had a another friend was You know an ex biker You know shaman and I had another friend. It was a kind of international playboy guy But what they all had in common was they just got this Chemistry thing with women and I started watching what they did and I'm the kind of guy that would literally go to the bar with Them and I've got my journal and I would stand there and listen to them and then stop them You know and say to her like he just made fun of you now Why are you laughing and giving him your number? you know and After several months of that and taking a lot of notes, I you know, I had this epiphany Basically that you know, I summarize as attraction isn't a choice and when I went through my dating guru phase this Even wrote a book by the title, but I realized that what these guys were doing was stuff I wouldn't have thought of in a million years They were saying things that would never have occurred to me to say to someone that I was interested in and attracted to but This counter-intuitive stuff was working. I Tried many different businesses That didn't work out and then when I finally launched my business and I grew it I realized that this pattern it carried over that the things that worked they weren't things that I would intuitively do You know at first our website was one page and all you could do was buy our product Well, then the guy that kind of taught me how to do this originally We put up a landing page where you couldn't come into the website unless you first opted in Now 80% of people that came to the website didn't opt in So we lost 80% of our audience and at first. I mean that seems Ridiculous, why would you just kick 80% of the people out? Well, it turned out that by doing that we probably 10xed our business because we were able to build a list and then build a series of auto responders that was hundreds deep and Optimized the follow-up. So there are a lot of counter-intuitive things that we need to do to succeed as Entrepreneurs and as investors and we have to remember that now. I'm a passionate advocate for individuals Okay, it's becoming It's really becoming trendy and important for us to think of the collective and the community and think of all of us but I tend to be passionate about individuals because I don't want the Importance of individuals and individuality to get lost in that. I don't want us to get forgotten powerful groups Powerful families are made up of powerful Individuals you have a bunch of weak individuals and they become a collective. You've got a weak collective And and you'll you'll hear I mean, you know, Matthew was just up here saying you know when we got started We wanted to make some money and then What happened right they became powerful they got their needs met and then if you just look around at what's happening here the collectivization Movement that they're now creating There's something to it, you know, there's an there's an electric energy here that wouldn't be had they decided to do this as the first thing Yeah So I think of entrepreneurship as being like an ultimate training ground an ultimate practice place To learn the basic skills that we need to learn in order to then come back and and be great at contribution Steven Covey has the model of first we start out Dependent and then we become independent and then we become interdependent and in developmental models if you study developmental psychology Which I recommend you do in any of the developmental models each level acts as a foundation for the next level So if we don't become powerfully independent We can't become powerfully interdependent and I think of entrepreneurship as being the best school Now for becoming powerfully independent Robert Kiyosaki who wrote rich dad poor dad and cash flow quadrant some other books that are excellent initial Training you know he's got this some this model where he says we start out as employee And then we go to self-employed and then we become business owners And then we become investors and then I would add then we become Philanthropists ideally we become people that come back and contribute and These build upon each other Okay, so when you're an employee you are you know you learn some tasks some skills You do them you get a paycheck when you become self-employed now you're responsible You have to go get the business as well. Then when you have a when you're a business owner You create that organism or that entity that then Runs and throws off the profit and then when you become an investor you invest in those types of entities and then Ideally when you become a philanthropist or someone that's contributing you start investing in the most important You know biggest why to scale up kind of projects And I say that model those five steps because entrepreneur business owner is in the middle And what I want to emphasize is that? Entrepreneurship and owning and building a business. It's one step in a much bigger puzzle. It's not the end and Unfortunately, I see a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck at that step They get to that level and they start becoming very successful And then they just want more and bigger and you know more money and more power Rather than realizing well That's just one step that I need to become competent in so that I can go on to the next level and go on to the next level So what's the difference between these levels? Well, essentially the difference is Each one becomes more complex and more multidimensional and has a longer time horizon All right, so when you're an employee you're just doing your work to get your paycheck in two weeks When you're self-employed all of a sudden the time horizon moves out and you learn about invoicing And you learn that companies don't pay invoices as fast as you used to get your paycheck And then when you become a business owner an entrepreneur, you know kind of proper You start thinking in time frames of months and in years in terms of return you become an investor You start thinking in terms of multiple years or even decades and then philanthropist, you know you look way out onto the horizon and And I say this because Because each level builds on the previous levels This entrepreneur level where you you start learning to manage a team to manage resources to think in multi-year time horizons It's a really important step for us to all go through and When I hear people tell me that they want to make an impact on the world and they go straight from You know high school to that or sometimes straight from college to that and they don't get a little experience working in the Entrepreneurial world my heart sinks a little bit because I think they're not going to be as powerful at making a difference or an impact In the world as they would have been had they gone and made themselves strong and powerful and successful first So it's a key developmental stage Entrepreneurship is a is a real key stage and as we learn about the The steps and the actions and the models and we formalize how to do it Let's encourage our young people to become entrepreneurs and to Actualize their own potentials and to make themselves strong first so that they can come just like in Joseph Campbell's Hero's journey they can return Right, and they can bring the elixir and they have it embodied and they they have you know they've made themselves strong and independent and successful and They've gotten to the point where they can give and they can take without guilt and without shame And they understand the trade-offs across all these dimensions And that's what I've got for you so reflections thoughts comments River Thank you. Enjoy that Can I have your book, please? But don't tell my wife Yes, you can have it and it'll help you with your life Sure, thank me enjoyed the story Yeah, sure. We Business angel we deal with young companies young startups and I like the bit you said to get powerful first and unfortunately I think there's a Child-centric society that we have now that the kids think it's just there, you know Larry else did it Bill Gates did it I can be rich now famous and you can be famous for being famous for doing nothing So so there's a real mix of things and I like the idea of learning the trade And you call the trade become the entrepreneur. I don't use entrepreneur myself I don't regard myself as an entrepreneur people tell them I am so I'm a bit embarrassed about it. Sorry Closer entrepreneur This is a good coming out. I'm coming. This is a good place to come It's a good safe place to go. So I did like I just wanted to say I like the The grade you talked about and so fortunately I'm out in a position where I can get involved in Helping other businesses and help people grow, but I do want them to learn to walk first Yeah, hi, thank you for that. Um, I Haven't quite articulated what I'm sort of grappling with so it's sort of a smush of those two talks But I'm just curious about the messages we send out about entrepreneurship and like an unanswered concern I have about you know that entrepreneurship and impact and success and how there's a lot of the things that I'd call like almost like a fetish That fetishization of entrepreneurship, you know before you're really there and I guess my concern like where I'm at I just aware of little advantages that I haven't and my privilege and I'm wondering how is it that I succeed by? You know being a man and therefore I have access through having a bear with this person who introduces me to someone else that Maybe we're sending these messages out to succeed and I'm just curious. How does I guess my question is how do we make entrepreneurship? That has social impact not a luxury good Something that everyone can have access to because I don't really know what the answer is Do you want the politically correct answer? Do you want what I really think? What do we what do we want? Okay good It really occurs to me that some of us got natural wiring hard wiring that the Evolutionary psychologists would probably have some correlation and say is heritable that give us an advantage as entrepreneurs That's what I believe that I believe some of us got some gifts and some wiring that make us naturally good at Entrepreneurship and a lot of folks There they got gifts where they're naturally good at some other things that are just as important Right so some people when they get into the entrepreneurship world They're gonna it's gonna come a lot easier to them and they're going to thrive more and for some folks who Are really not gifted in other areas, but are very gifted in the entrepreneurship Kind of gifts. I think that they sometimes hide out there They go and that becomes their Their place where they can hide from the world and where they can be safe so for example Several friends that I have a very good in entrepreneurship, but they're not very good in relationship Yeah, and so it's easy to go hide out in more success and more money To try to buy the things that they think will get relationship rather than develop in relationship Now that said whether or not we have the gift the natural You know gifts for entrepreneurship I think all of us should still go study it and we should all go figure it out Just like someone that might be naturally highly gifted in entrepreneurship may not be You know again, for example highly gifted in empathy and relationship They should still go learn empathy and relationship and compassion And develop that side of them as well cool, thanks, and I think where it gets really exciting is Where you have the layers of employee to entrepreneur a business owner Investor philanthropist is when we can have a lens of impact throughout that so we don't have to wait till you know We're at the end of our lives and we've got a ton of money because we're successful entrepreneurs to give back But as Matthew was saying if we're able to instill those threads of social and environmental impact throughout our journey Then I think collectively we can be very powerful Yeah, and the internet has changed the game I mean it was very recent that no one realized anything that was going on in the world We're any of the problems we had and all of a sudden now We're plugged in and we can all see what's going on and young people are curious and they're interested in the planet and so Yeah, I mean we young people can now go in they can you know be an employee for a company that's making an impact and we can We can start aligning ourselves from a much younger age Yeah, Kenny Yeah, thank you Evan. I partly became an entrepreneur because I'm basically unemployable, you know I just don't like working for other people but yeah Having worked and working both in the for-profit and non-profit sector One of the most striking things to me was that for example when I started seeds of change and dealt a lot with the media and the press Just the fact that it was a business Suddenly made biodiversity cool and people were you know had a completely positive orientation Because somehow there was some value associated with its being a business in the non-profit sector like with Bioneers You regarded as a do-gooder, you know, and there's this kind of yes We'll be charitable towards you because you're trying to do something good in the world but it actually devalues it and From my perspective, I mean, it's almost irrelevant whether it's commercial or non-commercial It's the real question is the motive, you know behind that or the mix of motives and then there's a steady and tropic Process that I've witnessed over the several decades now Where businesses that started originally impacted vesting was just called SRI social responsible investing the the kind of you know No, Menclature du jour keeps shifting, but I don't see a big difference But most of these companies have been bought up by the majors I mean all the independent food companies are no longer independent the mission There's tremendous mission drift and it ultimately ends up mostly about being you know making money So I wonder if you would comment on that Yeah, you know You were talking to kind of the esteem of People in a way. I think they're their own self-image. I was having a conversation Recently so in the last few years I've become very interested in art in visual art and my wife and I have started collecting a lot of visual art and I've been getting to know Some of what I think of as the best artists who have ever lived and it's really neat to Plug into these people who are in a completely different current than I've been involved in and get to know them What I've noticed is a consistent Most of them are basically starving artists, you know They paint a few pictures and then they sell a few pictures and they're trying to support their families and trying to make it and a lot of them they they've adopted the Money and success is bad kind of thing and yet they're trying to support themselves and one of these artists Who have been getting to know over the last year or so who have you know? Skyped with maybe six or eight times or something like that. So we've become friends and we've had some several conversations And he's he's one of these, you know, money's bad He's got that success as bad and those people that have it are kind of bad kind of thing So I've been working on I'm trying to get him to realize no no for someone like you money's very good Like if you had a lot of money this world would get much better because you'd be good You know steward of it and we finally had the conversation a few weeks ago. We were talking and he said kind of okay What's it like? you know, it's like to have not had money and then have money and You know, I got to and these are great conversations have it was like it's actually pretty cool, man Like it's you know, come on, you know So unfortunately a lot of folks who are You know, it's kind of the dark side in a way of the demonizing and projection But a lot of folks who are getting involved in contribution because they didn't have a chance to experience success For themselves first if the temptation comes around later on It's very hard, you know to resist or even you don't recognize it, you know, you don't even know maybe you don't you Going through business for a few years, you know, you get bit you learn about how You know real hardcore Capitalistic kind of people think you get screwed a few times you get hacked on your server like all these things happen And you come back to the world Maybe a little more cynical but more experienced and if you've got a good heart It just makes you better able I think to you know contribute in a lot of ways. So Yeah, I don't know if I answered your question directly But I think I'm with you and I think if we all went through an entrepreneur phase and a more independent phase we would be better Because if we would start an operation and we'd you know We'd start a business that we would be growing and it would be making an impact and instead of oh look There's an offer on the table. I'm gonna sell this because I need the money We would say no, you know what I'm gonna stay with this because this thing has a mission and we're gonna You know cuz I don't I don't have to Cool, okay, we've got one more question Okay Just wanted to reflect on something that you're saying about the professional journey it would go through you know employees and coming entrepreneurs and all that and Something that occurred to me. I recently went to Wonderlust festival here in New Zealand, which actually was in a very similar sort of dome And one of the guys Robbie Pollard was talking about Johnny Pollard was talking about the importance of Being centered and aware and conscious yourself before you actually start doing something you know for others and and so it reflected on what Matthew is saying earlier and Brian are things well like if we talk about Impact entrepreneurship and the importance of the inner journey as well as with the sort of psychological journey that you talked about you know if we want to make sure that Those those entrepreneurs actually have an impact that makes sense and they don't get disturbed by their own egos and by other things that sort of confused them on their journey We really have to Help them with that spiritual journey as well and in a way You know if you look around here for a lot of people that are in the business world They they kind of stay away from anything. That's slightly, you know in the in the spiritual world or in the So, you know yoga and meditation practice and the question for me is like, how do we bring that into the business world? How do we normalize that experience for entrepreneurs because I think if we don't do that You know that even with the best intentions that the impact will not be You know, you know something that that's going to help the planet or that's going to help our system Thoughts on that. Yeah, how do we do that? I Think a model that I've learned from Ken Wilber That's starting to move through the culture a little bit I think that if we could all if this could become one of the more important models that we all Communicate as part of what we do it could help with that and that is the idea that to transcend means to include That when you go beyond something it doesn't mean to reject where you were at before or to Marginalize or demonize it. It means to then use that as a building block for the next level so for example in spiritual development there's You know, there's a current of the ego is this bad thing The reality is the ego is just as natural and just as normal as our body or our emotions or our Reflexive thinking consciousness the challenge comes when we become overly identified with the ego exclusively and What we can do is we can do practices where we can go beyond the ego Or we can but that means to transcend it which means to include it And it's very counter-intuitive for most people to think of building a strong ego in order to transcend the ego And that's a it's a little subtle distinction Right, but to to transcend means to include to go beyond so if we learn to transcend Means to include and then we learn developmental models that at each level We take what was at the previous level and it becomes a building block that we start using for the next level I think that can help us be more integrated as as humans and to not take who we were and to Continually have the need to demonize that and to make that wrong and bad and to project and do all this kind of shadow You know casting on it Yeah, so to transcend means to include to go beyond Cole final fiction I just wanted to to say in response to that too. I'm going to give a plug for this conference Happening unfortunately was happening while we were out here this month wisdom 2.0 in Silicon Valley And it's a gathering of hundreds of people who are specifically focused on this question of bringing more mindfulness Yoga practice meditation into business and there's folks from Google and Facebook and medium and all these different companies who are Figuring it out. And so they're talking about things like, you know employee benefits programs that have meditation retreat sponsored as part of the Perks and what does that look like and how do you institutionalize? A more mindfulness based practice and ritual inside of companies. So wisdom 2.0, and they put all the talks online. It's great one last thought post hierarchy Going beyond hierarchy It's post hierarchy and One of the best ways to go beyond hierarchy is to learn entrepreneurship Because you you have to master hierarchy To really learn the skills of it experientially and Then once you learn it like anything else once you learn a rule that you can then go beyond it Right, so let's go beyond the hierarchy. Let's not make it an evil bad thing Let's learn what it is and learn why it happens and then let's go beyond it Thanks very much