 Really quickly, this video is the first of something new that I'm doing, which is every single Wednesday I'm going to be talking about music, entertainment, and pop culture from a business and entrepreneurship perspective, and just business in general. Let's get into it. It's the network. Pow! What's up everybody? Once again, it's Brandon. Man, Shawn. And this video is brought to you by BrandonNetwork.com because I signed myself. Now, I'm excited to finally be doing this video on Nipsey Hussle. I did one on him years ago, and of course, since his unfortunate passing, he's just been on my mind and I wanted to know how I could approach a video that did him justice, not just a compilation video. So what I did was break down some important aspects of who he stood himself to be when it comes to the knowledge that he projects, the knowledge that he shares so much, but then also the practical leadership strategies that he shows himself. So there's two major things that I'm going to contrast with a book by the name of Great By Choice that really covers how 10X companies, that's companies that have performed 10X more than other companies in their industries have 10X leaders. That means great companies and great leaders. This book is called Great By Choice and I think it's extremely important to see how practically the things that Nipsey Hussle preaches, they're not only inspiring, but they actually play out in real life. So without further ado, let's get to this video. I'm going to start with a screen share. Now on the second half of this video, we're going to talk about some key traits that is going to be required to be a 10X leader, but of course, we can't talk about Nipsey without talking the marathon. Let's start here with an excerpt from the book Great By Choice. Imagine you're standing with your feet in the Pacific Ocean in San Diego, California, looking inland. You're about to embark on a 3,000 mile walk from San Diego to the tip of Maine and on the first day you march 20 miles making out of town. On the second day you march 20 miles and again on the third day you march 20 miles heading into the heat of the desert. It's hot more than 100 degrees and you want to rest in the coolness of your tent, but you don't. You get up and you march 20 miles. You keep the pace 20 miles a day, then the weather cools and you're in comfortable conditions with the wind at your back and you could go much farther, but you hold back modulating your effort and you stick with your 20 miles. Then you reach Colorado High Mountains and get hit by snow, wind and temperatures below zero and all you want to do is stay in your tent, but you get up, you get dressed, you march 20 miles. You keep this effort no matter what. Now you should get the point 20 miles, 20 miles, 20 miles, but now imagine the other person. He starts out in the exact same place and he gets all excited by the journey and hits 40 miles in his very first day, but then exhausted from his first gigantic day, he wakes up to 100 degree temperatures, then he decides to hang out until the weather cools, thinking I'll make it when the conditions improve. He maintains the pattern big days with good conditions, whining and waiting in his tent on bad days as he moves across the western United States. Just before the Colorado High Mountains, he gets a spate of great weather, he goes all out once again, but then he gets hit with a huge weather storm and then utterly exhausted, it nearly kills him and he hunkers down in his tent waiting for spring. This pretty much sounds like the tortoise and the hare, right? That typical story that so many of us have heard, but this is actually the reflection of two companies. The reason we use 20 miles is because there's something called the 20 mile march that is exactly the same as Nipsey Hussle's Marathon. So there's a company by the name of Striker Corporation and Striker Corporation had a great CEO by the name of John Brown and this guy is where they coined the term the 20 mile march, which once again is completely parallel with Nipsey Hussle's Marathon. What was the 20 mile march? The CEO, John Brown, again, determined and demanded that they should grow 20% every single year. 20% every year, no matter what. And what that really looked like is, yo, I don't care if it's hot outside, if it's cold outside in terms of the marketplace, if it's a recession or if it's a great, great, you know, market and it's easy to grow. I don't care what it is. We need to grow at least 20% so much so that if you didn't grow that 20% in your department, then you got the snorkel award, which essentially meant, yo, you were underwater, you need a snorkel to breathe. I mean, he actually created a physical award to put on people's desk, right? But if you had that for two years, then he'll get involved and that's just a whole other story. You didn't want that. But the other side is even more important that people wouldn't necessarily expect. Just as much as he demanded that you grow 20% every single year, he actually demanded that you hold back and not grow too much consistency over just taking the opportunities of an easy market. So in a recession or something might be hard, we're still going to push and try to get to that 20%. But if things look great outside, we're still not going to say, oh, no, we're going to grow 60% this year. We're going to grow 100% this year. We're trying to keep it within that main sweet spot 20%, 20%, 20% because we're playing the long game. We're not trying to just jump and go back and forth. That volatile marketplace. And I'm going to show you what that looked like between Striker Corporation, it's a medical technologies companies, in juxtaposition with one of their primary competitions back in the day, which was USCC, another medical technologies company. Here's a graphical representation of what Striker's growth looked like when juxtaposed with USSC. Now I want you to notice something because Striker is company A and USSC is company B. And as you can see, their growth stopped. Here's why. Now in 1989, all the way to 1992, they had massive growth from 345 million to 1.2 billion. But by 1998, they were out of business. They had to be acquired just to survive. I forget the name of the company, but they had to be acquired. So on the contrast, Striker was able to keep going and keep growing. Why? Because they had the 20 mile march. Having extremely high highs and low lows might sound good for an artist, but is not great for an actual company and it being sustainable. So if you contrast and look at the growth from 1989 at 345 million to 1992 at 1.2 billion and then consider a 20 mile march, what it actually should have looked like was in 1989, 345 million in 1990, 414 million. And then in 1991, 496 million. I know it's not as great as 1.2 billion. However, over time, it'll look more like company A versus company B. People forget the power of compound, right? How things exponentially grow if you stay consistent over time. But you don't have to have this massive effort once, only to have almost no effort another time. It's funny because I just posted on Instagram a video about Eminem working from nine to five every single day versus doing these random spurts. And some people were like, yo, you can't grow like that. You can't do that at the beginning, but doesn't seem so. When you look at the evidence again and again, it's more about consistency over time. Now, I think that's pretty clear. If not, we can talk about it more in the comment section below. But I want to shift over to the leadership mechanisms and things that made Nipsey so powerful and the things that you can adapt and adopt if you want to be a 10X leader. So we can start with the story of one guy who made history versus another guy who froze to death along with his team. This is the story of Role Amundsen versus Robert Scott. This is the difference, again, versus a 20 mile march versus a non-20 mile march. I'm not gonna go extreme details into that part of their story because they have other parts we already talked about the 20 mile march. However, Amundsen actually did the same thing, right? He said he was gonna go 15 miles, it's a different number, but it was still that consistent number to get to the South Pole. There was two guys who were actually racing to become the first people to reach the South Pole, hang their flag and keep going. Amundsen traveled with his team 15 miles every single day. Scott, on the other hand, actually went back and forth, right? He was volatile and ultimately it killed him and his team. But it wasn't just that part of his decision making. There were actually a few other decisions that you can see that get reflected by 10X leader types and why they're so important and impactful. Here's an excerpt about the myth of 10X leaders that the writers of Great By Choice found in all of their research. The myth was successful leaders in a turbulent world are bold, risk-seeking visionaries. However, on the contrary, what they found was the best leaders were studied and did not have a visionary ability to predict the future. They observed what worked. They figured out why it worked and built upon proven foundations. They were not more risk-taking, more bold, more visionary and more creative than their comparisons. They were more disciplined, more empirical and more paranoid. And if you don't believe me or them, then check out this quick statement from Gary Vee. So my punchline is very simply, the future is always the present, right? If you're guessing the future, you're guessing. If you're moving quickly in the reality, it seems like you're predicting, but you're just reacting. In this clip, Gary Vee's basically doing a great job summarizing what Great By Choice defines and describes as a 10X leader, especially the trait of having empirical creativity. Now, if you don't know what empirical means, then we can just look at Google, right? Empirical means based on concerned with or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. This is an extremely important trait. And you'll see it in Amundsen and you'll see it in Nipsey, which we'll get to in a second. But this is simply not thinking this visionary aspect is something that really relates to the people who perform highly. People always think that it's always about this visionary aspect of things. But what visionaries truly are, the correct visionaries are usually people who have the right reference points and they see things before other people see them. They don't imagine them, it's not this isolated closed off perspective of just being able to see because you're special. It's really just being in a place or having a perspective of things that allow you to see things before everybody else happens to see those obvious things. So if you can think about a lot of young people happen to see artists before they blow up to the masses, right? You're onto this new music and you are a visionary in seeing that artist's career if you were somebody who invested in it. When really you just discovered them early, you found the information early and then when it blew up, you now look like a visionary to people. That's essentially what's happening in business and so many other places across the board, whether it's your operations, whether it's the product you decide, whether it's the industry you decide to create, however you're defining your marketing is happening again and again and again. And that's far more important that empirical based on evidence creativity so it's already happening just not at scale, then imagining something like these other people think when we're talking about this visionary aspect of things. So here's a perfect example when it comes to Amundsen. Amundsen actually had a big advantage on Scott when it comes to his starting point. Now, so many people in the past had started in the same place and that place was called Mercurdo Sound. Now people started there because it was safe, right? You have to remember we're going to the South Pole, especially back in those days, but just going there in general still you have to deal with a lot of ice, but ice isn't always stable. You can fall through ice, it's a whole issue, right? It's a completely dangerous operation, but Amundsen didn't start from that same place that everybody else started from. He started from a place that most people distrusted. They said it's not stable and it's extremely dangerous, which was the Bay of Wells. But he didn't just take the barrier for whatever the people said. He actually did some research. He researched expeditions years before all kind of documentation looked for inconsistencies and found that there was this one structure that people were ignoring, this one consistent dome-like structure in the Bay of Wells that had not moved for 70 years. And because of that, he concluded that that was a stable place. What's so important about all this? Him being able to start there versus where everybody else started actually gave him a 60 mile advantage of being closer to the South Pole than his competition in Scott. Perfect example. This is what empirical creativity looks like, right? You have a creative solution and you see what other people couldn't see, but you based it on actual information, actual experience, things that weren't just imagined and cross-checking your sources because sometimes people's data is either incorrect or incomplete. And that's why someone actually described Amundsen as one of those rare explorers who actually had the ability to be an explorer, but also take in information and deduce a good conclusion from it. Now, that sounds kind of like an artist, right? People don't expect artists to be able to have a scientific approach to things or see information as it truly is or find solutions other than what other people kind of feed to them. But Nipsey is a perfect example of that as well. Now, we all know how much people preach against record labels these days, right? Essentially, that's the Bay of Wells, the dangerous place to be. However, we know that Nipsey signed and this is him speaking on the decision that he made when it comes to signing with Atlantic, right? He said, to give the music a really fair chance to make sure that it gets its proper platform, we knew we always wanted to go back into a major situation as a partner, but we had to get our weight back up outside of the negotiating table to do that. I was always trying to figure out what the strategy would be, but to go into the next level of the game, you have to tap into a resource pool, whether it's your own resources or a partnership or reinvesting. The decision was really about me thinking about the message in the music and it deserves to have a global platform. Once I figured that out, it was all about what terms our deal would be on and being able to justify that request when we sit down. So when you think in terms of Nipsey Hussle, the way that he sat down analyzed the situation and said, yes, there's a lot of danger in this space. However, there's a specific place, a specific point, a specific deal that would actually be an analogy to that one part in the Bay of Wales that dome-like structure that hadn't moved for 70 years. There's a landing point that if I can get there, then I'll be safe. I'll be good. And he had to take the time to make sure it gets done, put in the research and then build out a particular platform that allowed him to do so. And then you see the same type of empirical creativity. Once again, creativity that's based on evidence when he did his $100 mixtape run. That didn't just come out of nowhere, he based it on his readings from Contagious to actually be able to see something working in one situation and seeing evidence of that, but then being able to transfer that is a high trait, a necessary trait of a 10x leader. Now, we can move on to the second part of things, preparation because Nipsey Hussle was so huge when it came to preparation. If you listen to him again and again and again, you'll always see him talking about building a plan, you gotta have a plan and sticking to the script. Having a plan and sticking to the script, you'll see him say stick to the script so many times if you watch all of his interviews. Because you have to remember, we're talking about business right here. Yes, we wanna get as much money as possible, we wanna have as big of a company as possible, all those things, but at the end of the day, business is about minimizing risk. And having a plan does that, being empirical meaning looking for data and proof of things before you take certain steps that limits that risk once again. Even when you look back at Amundsen versus Scott, a key decision that got made was Amundsen went on his journey with more than enough supplies. I'm talking about not just food and more than enough food, but other supplies where if you lose one, you have another one as backup. However, Scott was going for the speed. Not only are we not going to be consistent and just go 15 miles a day and push way past that if we can so we can try to get there first, he also had just enough supplies so it could actually have a lighter load on their cargo and they could move faster. He's thinking about speed. Amundsen is thinking about success. At the end of the day, you have to remember, this is a life or death situation, but people don't understand, oftentimes if you bring that back to a company, it's life or death for a company, but people don't see it or understand it because they're not doing this research and basing it off real information and the idea of sustainability, the marathon versus getting this short-term version of success. Because as Nipsey says, have a plan and get rid of doubt or in the words of Rod Amundsen, victory awaits him who has everything in order. Luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time. This is called bad luck. Now I actually can talk about this for days and how Nipsey really had practices that was reflected across multiple industries when you look at who are the top performers and their beliefs and their philosophies and just how they act in general, but what I wanna end on is just one key insight. When it comes to people who are actually visionaries, well actually that's less important when people who are actually leaders, great leaders is less this whole visionary aspect or focus on any of these things that sound more superficial. It's more about focusing on the actual results and because you are making certain achievements, people begin to use those terms like visionary or these terms like mogul and things of that nature. It's not pursuing those terms for the sake of themselves, right? A lot of people put those type of things in their IG bios, put entrepreneur in their IG bios, but they aren't actually entrepreneurs if you look at their actual practice in the business. It's one thing to pursue title in these cool terms and it's another thing to actually do business and then other people bring that term to you because what you do justifies the term. Keep that in mind, but as always this video is brought to you by BrainmanNetwork.com because I signed myself and hey we help artists build their brains and build their infrastructure to actually have a fan base, have a career. If you like this video, go ahead and like button. If you like, you might as well share and if you're not subscribed, you know what to do, hit that subscribe.