 about career issues or other challenges that they've had. And I think per your point, having a personal board of advisors, having a group of people that you could call through thick and thin is one of the best things that anyone could do to set themselves up. By the way, both professionally, but I would even say as well personally as well to have that group of people on a personal level too. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Facing these challenges and having such a different experience at Investopedia, you talk about having your personal board of advisors that you would go to and mentors that helped shape this decision-making process for you. So could you share a little bit with our audience how you approach building that personal board of advisors and how you grow your network because you had some heavy hitters in there that really helped guide you and shape you in some of those major decisions you made. Thank you AJ. So mentorship is number one reason that I've been relatively successful from career standpoint is luck. But the second one after that is definitely the mentors that I've had along the way. Whether it's been people like Kevin Ryan who was the CEO of Double Click at the time, ultimately the person that acquired Meetup and the founder of MongoDB and the Guild Group and Business Insider and Zolan, all these other companies are David Rosenblatt who is now the CEO of First Ibs and on the board of IAC and on the board of Twitter. These are people who I've known for 25 years. Luckily, again, it goes back to luck. And whenever I had issues, whenever I had questions, whether I had insecurities, whatever I just needed someone to be totally vulnerable around who had no agenda except for helping me and setting me up for as much success as I could. I went to them and I went to them numerous times for different things and I seeked out their advice because I had that experience. I have a cadre now of 10 to 20 different people that I do the same thing for now. And it is probably one of the most meaningful parts of my life, of my business life is the cadre of people that can call me about career issues or other challenges that they've had. And I think per your point, having a personal board of advisors, having a group of people that you can call through thick and thin is one of the best things that anyone could do to set themselves up. By the way, both professionally, but I would even say as well personally as well to have that group of people on a personal level too. With that, you know, right now you are on some people's personal board of advisors. So how did that come to be? How did they approach you? Like for those in our audience who aren't at CL level who want to get to that level, how do they even get personal board of advisors? What's the strategy there? Okay, I'm going to give you an example. So there's someone, her initials are EC. And actually, I got to know her when I first started at Meetup. Unfortunately, she was an initial round of layoffs, but I thought she did a great job. After the layoff, she said to me, you did exactly the right thing. My job was not important. I'm so impressed and we're in good hands that you did it. And then she called me up like a month later and she said, can you be my mentor? Just like that, straight up. And I said, I would love to help you, sure. You know, I'm not able to meet like every week or even every month, but on a quarterly basis, absolutely. I've written some career references for her to go to, you know, business school and other schools. But to answer your question, one person just said straight out, I think I could learn from you. Can you be my mentor? And it wasn't some like game or anything like that. It was just open, direct and honest. And that's the best, just be direct. Another person, I teach at Columbia, so I've had a, you know, 600 plus students through the years. And someone decided to want to become a startup founder. She said, can you be on our kind of our board of advisors? I'm like, sure. So, you know, advising her about different things. And she just got a million and a half dollar check round of financing, you know, for her startup as well. So those things just are wonderful. So I guess my answer is ask directly. And also if there's a business context for having someone on an advisor level or board level, then that's another opportunity to be able to kind of pull people into. I love that just being direct because I think so many people are like, well, what's the magic secret code and what's the email sequence I need to send? And sometimes if you know, you know, and if you've been able to establish that trust, build that rapport in the relationship through the work you've done, then asking that question of, hey, I would love your help is not that difficult. A hundred percent. And then afterwards, a lot of times someone will just say, hey, could I take you out to lunch? I'm like, I like food. Sure, let's go for lunch. At the end of the lunch, they'll usually say, not usually, sometimes someone will say, would you mind if we schedule another lunch for us in six months from now, just so we could keep this going? And I'm like, yes, do it. Anyone kills me? Maybe they didn't like the lunch, but half the time they did it and half the time they just forget and they don't do it. And it's so easy. So the best thing to do is like, when you're in the meeting, schedule the next followup meeting as opposed to waiting and forgetting. But yeah, the followup is so important. It's so important. Now you mentioned luck a number of times and I'm here in Vegas and I remember my first trip ever to Las Vegas. I was 21, didn't have much money and I was at the Palms Casino and they had a video poker game where you could put in a dollar and you could play a hundred hands, one penny a hand. And I remember sitting there at the screen and I just had all of these different opportunities to win and I started winning. I started hitting a few hands and all of a sudden, you know, I won a hundred bucks and I'm like, I kind of like Vegas but so many people come to Vegas, they put a hundred dollars down on black, bet it all, one opportunity. And one of your decision frameworks is creating and chasing multiple opportunities. Why put it all on one? So can you unpack that for our audience? Because I agree, you create luck by building more opportunities in your life for the luck to pay off. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Oh, that's such a great story. It is very similar to the way I've approached kind of everything, you know, from when I was first in business school and looking for a job, I didn't say like, oh, there's three jobs that are perfect for me. Let's craft the perfect resume and cover letter, you know, back in the day when they had cover letters, you know, to go to this like exact perfect job and like analysis paralysis, I sent out the exact same two line email to like 10,000 different potential people that I could get the job for and luck ends up happening and I get all these, you know, conversations. So to unpack it, unpack it further, I think one of the areas in decision making that people don't prioritize enough is whether or not a decision creates options for yourself or decreases options for yourself. So let's say you're really into finance. You can either go into, you go into a lot of things, if you choose investment banking, everyone wants to hire an investment banker who's worked for investment banking for two years. Everyone wants that kind of experience. If you become a trader because you love finance, like a specialized commodities macroeconomics trader, the next job you get is a specialized commodities macroeconomics trader, decreases options. When you have more options and you keep creating options for yourself, if you have a podcast like the two of you, if you let's write a book, if you do all these certain things or write an article for, you know, whatever, for anywhere, there are certain actions that could create significant opportunities. And then when you have all those opportunities, guess what? Lucky stuff just ends up happening to you because you now have, like you said, a hundred different slot machines all going at the same time. And even though it's only a penny, hey, that penny could still turn into a lot of money versus throwing it all on, you know, red 25 and, you know, going for that and then being disappointed that it doesn't work out. So I think the prioritizing optionality in decision-making directly results in making decisions that result in better luck. And luck, as I like to say, is hard work. You could work really hard and then lucky stuff will happen or you could sit on your butt playing video games all day and oh, bo-woe me, no lucky stuff ever happens to me. Okay, well, you know, that was a decision you made. I think right there we have to separate and drill down into the decisions that you had taken. And this is a difficult thing for all founders. We deal with it all the time, which is what are the opportunities that you chase? Because we certainly have gotten ourselves in trouble with all this technology and all this new stuff and all these opportunities. You can't take on all of them and you need some focus. And you certainly discussed that in the book. So could you help our audience out with that? Yeah, great. So one of our six core principles is actually called focus on impact. And what that means is that the best way to have an outsize impact is with focus. The key is that you not, okay, so it could sound contradictory, like you said, which is wait, in one hand you're saying, do lots of different things. In the other hand, you're saying, stay focused. How do you decide? How does it work? Okay, so here's the answer. If in the process of sending out lots of, I'll give the example of looking for a job, of sending out thousands of resumes and emails, if that takes you months and months to do, and the result of that is you're not doing other things that could be more valuable like meeting people and going for breakfast and having other things that could help advance your career, then you shouldn't do it. If however, I think of return on time a lot, meaning how efficient is the action that you're doing that's opening up lots of options. If it's efficient and you open up lots of options for yourself, proceed with it. But if you're in a company situation, it's very hard for most companies to succeed in putting bets in a whole lot of different areas. It's a great way to potentially fail. And as a company, because companies are so much more complex than just individuals, as a company, it's much more important to be focused. Whereas at an individual level, what's oftentimes more important is to not be too focused actually too quickly and early in your career. Oh, there's only one person, that type of person that I wanna date. You know, no, be open to different options as well, but don't spend all your time just inefficiently going on one date with 100 different people. That also doesn't make sense.