 Welcome to the 21 convention in Miami, Florida. This next speaker is a former speaker. 2014, he gave a speech about finding a mentor. And I gotta tell you, this guy has influenced so many young men's lives. I know them personally, they've told me about it, but he's gonna take it a step further about what happens when you get there and where to take it. This is, none other than Ed Druse. Thank you very much. You don't have to know what to do with your life. You don't have to know what to do with your life. I want to read you guys something. This comes from Cheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer at Facebook during a 2014 Harvard commencement address. When I sat in your seat all those years ago, I knew exactly where I was headed. I had it all planned out. I was going to the World Bank to work on global poverty, then to law school. Then I would spend my life working in a nonprofit or in the government. But 18 months later, I applied to Harvard Business School. It wasn't that I was wrong about what I would do decades after graduating. I had it wrong a year and a half later. And even if I could have predicted I would one day work in the private sector, I never could have predicted Facebook because there was no internet. And Mark Zuckerberg was in elementary school. You don't have to know what to do with your life. In many ways, it can be a tremendous advantage not to know. It can make you more lean, more agile, more versatile to an ever-changing economic and technological landscape. And it's well within your power simply to just reject the question. You don't have to know what to do with your life. Now with that out of the way, we can get into the main topic of this speech. The speech is entitled, How to Start Your Career. And my aim for the talk, my wildly ambitious aim, is for it to become the resource that mums, dads, brothers, sisters, teachers, future employers send to a young person ahead of their first day of their first real work position. We're going to be covering what I call the four killer strategies to get ahead in your career and answering questions like, how can I win an employer's trust to actually get given creative freedom on projects? How can I present my ideas in such a way that I get given a shot at taking them on? And how can I win over colleagues to have them infused and energized about projects that I'm very much the driving force behind? In essence, this talk is going to be how to become indispensable to an organization. Now, for the past six and a bit years, I've been working with a speaker and coach by the name of Matthew Hussie. In that time, I've helped Matthew to become a New York Times bestselling author to speak in front of over 150,000 people live in person all across the world and to develop a YouTube channel with over half a million subscribers. If you tot up all of Matthew's various different channels, he has videos which rack up more than 100 million views. So I've really helped this guy make a name for himself. But I don't by any means wish to imply that I have had the perfect start to my career, far from it. But in having dropped out of school at just 17 years old to begin working with Matthew and having played a very pivotal role in helping build his team from what began as just four people, four guys working in a London apartment to what is now a worldwide team. We are an entirely remote team of about 30 people. I've really seen who comes in to a company and does an extraordinary job, who has a bit of a slow start and who just has an awful time of it no matter what. And so I'm gonna be distilling down the very best of what I've learned from that coupled with my own experience. I'll be sharing that with you here today. Now to be clear on what this talk is not about, it's not going to be about Machiavellian backstabbing, how to get ahead by any means necessary. Really it's gonna be about how to do great work and move an organization forward and really yourself naturally in the process. It's also not going to be a completely comprehensive talk that applies to all industries and organizational types. If you take a lot of what I'm about to share with you into a big bloated bureaucracy, some of it's will help. More of its will probably get you fired by next Wednesday. So really this is a talk for going into a small fledgling company, the kind of place I think a young person should be joining to get as much experience as possible and to get the hands dirty in as many different areas as possible. Without wasting any time in getting started, our first killer strategy is initiative. Now what do I mean when I say the word initiative? Del Carnegie, the celebrated author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, once wrote, I'll tell you, it's doing the right thing without being told. Doing the right thing without being told. Harvard Business Review in an article by William Onkin Jr. and Donald L. Was. Go one step further in offering about five degrees of initiative from lowest to highest. Number one, wait until told. Number two, ask what to do. Number three, recommend then take resulting action. Number four, act but advise at once. And number five, act on own then routinely report. Now I learned about the importance of initiative very early on in my time with Matthew. It was essentially my very first day, the very first hour of my very first day. I was assigned the task of creating an email account for myself on the company's domain, so Edward at company. And at 17, not knowing what a hosting account was or how I could in any way attach this to a Gmail account, I turned to the technical looking person next to me and as meekly and subserviently as I could, I said, is this something that you could help me with? It would only take a couple of minutes to do, right? Without missing a beat, this person turned and said, it'd take 30 seconds. But if I do this for you now, you'll come to me with everything. And if that happens, you won't last here very long. This might seem a little bit cruel. I was 17 years old, it was my very first day. But these were the kindest words that this person possibly could have said and were now very good friends. I consider those words fundamentally shifted the trajectory that I've been on ever since. Now, initiative isn't just a defensive play to stop you from bothering your colleagues. It's also the greatest offensive play you can possibly have in your arsenal. Winding the clock forward two years, Matthew has just landed a book agent and he's going out to various different meetings with book publishers, both in the UK, where we're both from, as well as the US. And at this time I had no involvement whatsoever with the project nor was there any reason why I should be involved, but I wanted to be. Now Matthew has this saying, it's actually something he talked about when he spoke at the 21 convention a number of years ago and it's rather profound, so prepare yourselves. The saying is, stuff leads to stuff. If you want more stuff in a particular area, do more stuff in that area. So I wanted some more stuff in the book world, the book project world, specifically to do with book marketing. And so I read everything that I possibly could about that area. I looked at competitors and studied their launches and asked what are they doing, as well as people in other industries. And I wrote up all of my findings, I put it into a 10 page report and I shared this with Matthew and he was rather impressed. The very next day Matthew got a phone call. This wasn't from his book agent at this point. Both of the deals had been settled, but this was from his television agents and it was a call to say that he had just been invited to go and be part of a major NBC show called Ready for Love. It was one that Eva Longoria would be executive producing. The kicker was that he had just two weeks to uproot his entire life from London and move to Los Angeles permanently. So with that, which he was absolutely going to say yes to, the filming during the day and then the writing of the book, evenings and weekends, it left Matthew with absolutely no time whatsoever for the actual book marketing. And so he basically said, this is now yours, go see what you can do. I was 19 years old. I was very fortunate in the way that the deals had been structured in that the UK version would come out four months ahead of the US version. So this was acted as a kind of dummy run, allowing me to test a few things as well as to prove myself to Matthew and prove that my ideas were effective. The book came out in January 2013 in the UK and it was a pretty good success. I then went back to Matthew and said, I've got a few more ideas of things I think we should do for the US version. And by this point, he really trusted my ideas and we decided we would go forward with them. Now, one of them was to do a book trailer video. And at this point, I should say that Matthew's coaching business is a dating advice company for women. A company called Get the Guy. So kind of hitch for women on a very big scale. And the concept that we came up with for the trailer was a video called Kids Talk Dating Problems. It was child actors playing out the relationship dilemmas of adults. It was an adorable little video that was also quite controversial and we had a very young girl say the word lesbian, which a lot of people didn't like. So this video came out two weeks ahead of the book coming out in the US. And within 48 hours, it had over 2 million views. It was a very big success. It was picked up and put at the very top of Reddit. It was on the homepage of YouTube. It was also picked up by The Today Show. Matthew was subsequently invited to go in and speak about the book on the show. And because he's pretty good on camera in that sort of environment, he was invited back a further three times in the space of a week, something which is otherwise unheard of and went on to become a regular contributor on the show for over a period of two years. Now, the climax of the launch was me being flown out to New York to give one big last push. And we were staying with the cast of the television show and with ABC's, excuse me, NBC's enormous advertising budget. The cast were on the top of just about every yellow cab in the city. So that was pretty cool. Getting to go behind the scenes of The Today Show and the Rockefeller Center, seeing how all of that happens and being a year or two too early to even crack a beer legally in the States in order to celebrate. But the book came out and it was an immediate New York Times bestseller and it was just an incredible experience. With 20 years old, I really felt on top of the world. And I'm here to tell you that if you want that sort of experience, it can only come through initiative. It can only come as a result of you being a driving force behind your own career. So with that, I want to offer four hard-hitting tactical ways that you can develop more initiative in your career. The first is a mindset. I want you to begin to see your employer as a client. Even if you have the stability of a contract and you have the regularity of payroll, I want you to imagine yourself as a freelancer. What would a freelancer be doing? They'd be pitching projects to their employer. If stuff leads to stuff, where do you want more stuff? Where can you be going and doing different things? Now when people present their ideas to employers and people that work with managers, supervisors, they tend to do so in a bit of a throwaway sense. Even if they have the best idea in the world, kind of quickly draft an email and send it over, or they'll mention it at the very end of a meeting. This might sound a bit extreme, but I want to encourage you to begin to see all of your internal communication of this sort as a copywriting exercise. You're copywriting. You have to make what you're doing persuasive. You're having to really sell them on this vision. Now in my first talk at the 21 Convention, I offered an email formula, a three-step email formula that you could use to construct emails to someone that you admire and want to work with. And it just so happens that the three steps work very well in this scenario, so I'll recap them here. The three steps are dream problem solution. What is the dream that this person has? Why are they getting up out of bed in the morning? And if you're working with someone, I would hope that you're intimately familiar with what that is and you know they're a big driver. The next problem, this can otherwise be said as opportunity. What is the opportunity that you've spotted? And then solution. How can you present yourself as the solution based on past work that you've done as the best candidate for taking this project forward? The second tactic is to study the history of your industry. Most people don't read. And if you become a reader and you become a voracious reader, you'll give yourself a tremendous advantage in everything you do. Now, this is something that self-improvement writers and speakers have been saying for centuries. So I'll just quickly read from the 1910 book or essay How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett. He writes, you are a bank clerk and you have not read that breathless romance disguised as a scientific study. Walter Badgett's Lombard Street. Ah, my dear sir. If you had begun with that and followed it up for 90 minutes every other evening, how enthralling your business would be to you and how much more clearly you would see human nature. So become a reader and study the history of your industry, not just the ancient history many centuries ago, but the recent history of what have competitors been doing in the last weeks and months. But number three, don't just confine yourself to books. How can you go out and speak and perhaps even interview experts of industry and professionals? Going back to our role model of Sheryl Sandberg in a 2011 New Yorker profile, it's noted, in January of 1991, Larry Summers became the chief economist at the World Bank. And that spring, he recruited Sandberg as a research assistant. At the time, the World Bank was deciding whether to bail out Russia. Someone asked, Summers recalls, whether a bailout in 1917 could have saved the country from 70 years of communism. He posed the question to Sandberg. What most students would have done, Summers notes, is gone off to the library, skimmed some books on Russian history and said they weren't sure it was possible. What Sheryl did was call Richard Pipes, who is a leading historian of the Russian Revolution and a professor at Harvard. She engaged him for over an hour and took detailed notes. The next day, she reported back to Summers. This is the kind of thing you ought to be doing in your career. And the obvious question that arises is, well, I don't have that many Harvard professors on speed dial, what do I do? And to that I say, we live in a truly phenomenal time right now where you could, if you wanted, look up just about any Harvard professor or any other university, for that matter's email address, in just a few clicks. If you wanted to find the email address for the editor of The New Yorker, you could do so. If you wanted to write to Jeff Bezos, you can find an email address that he personally reads. So we live in this quite remarkable time. The first step is just having the nerve to ask and to capitalize on that. But to separate yourself and really give yourself a shot at getting a worthwhile and meaningful response, it's important to convey and imply the research you've done on somebody. Most inboxes of people are filled with unconsidered, atrocious, long, rambling emails. If you can stand out by writing something that's concise and asks incisive questions, you will give yourself a shot at standing out. If you make this a regular habit, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how often people get back to you. The fourth tactic is to work hard. Now this sounds a bit obvious, it's a bit like eat your greens, but I wanna read a few more quotes that will hopefully inspire it and really bring the point home. From Ashley Vance's biography on Elon Musk, if you're at Tesla, you're choosing to be at the equivalent of the special forces. There's the regular army and that's fine, but if you're working at Tesla, you're choosing to step up your game. From Brad Stone's The Everything Store, a book on Jeff Bezos and Amazon. It's not easy to work here. When I interview people, I tell them, you can work long, hard or smart, but at amazon.com, you can't choose two out of the three. I'm going back to Elon Musk. An employee could be telling Musk that there's no way to get the cost on something down to where he wants it, or that there's simply not enough time to build apart by Musk's deadline. Elon will say, fine, you're off the project and I am now CEO of the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time and I will deliver it. Kevin Brogan, who was an early SpaceX engineer, says, what's crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he's fired someone and taken their job, he's delivered on what the project was. Now, to conclude on this point, initiative really is a muscle. It's something that you develop over time, so don't feel intimidated. You have to go and immediately start pitching 90 different projects. Instead of turning to that person next to you, could you just have the restraint or the self-reliance to go and see if you can figure it out yourself? Now, I'm not saying never ask anybody for help, but just don't make that your default. Allow that to plant the seed and go on and become somebody who really embodies a tremendous level of initiative. Now, our second killer strategy is learning how to apologize effectively. If initiative is the gas pedal, learning to apologize is the break. When you're young and just getting started, you won't want to take your foot too far from the pedal because you will be screwing up quite a lot. Now, shortly into my time working with Matthew, I was fortunate to pick up a book that I've already mentioned, Del Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. And despite the often mocked title, if you're someone who wants to go somewhere and you've not yet read this book, I highly suggest you do. Now, I want to highlight here chapter three. It's a chapter on apologizing, and it's really one that saved me more times than I can count. Now, Del begins telling a story of walking his dog in a park and he decides to let the dog off the leash and to run free. As soon as he does, a park ranger runs right over to him and says, you're not allowed to do that. If I see you doing this again, there'll be severe consequences. Now a week later, Del is back in the park. It's a lovely summer's day and nobody is around. And so he decides he's going to risk it and let the dog run free. You can probably see where this is going. As soon as he does, the dog bolts off over the nearest hill and Del goes on chasing after him. As soon as he gets to the top of the hill, he realizes the dog has run straight into the park ranger. Now on getting caught, Del goes on to write. I was in for it. I knew it. So I didn't wait until the policeman started talking. I beat him to it. I said, officer, you've caught me red-handed. I'm guilty. I have no alibis, no excuses. You warned me last week that if I brought the dog out here again without a muzzle, you would find me. Well now, the policeman responded. I know it's a temptation to let a little dog like that have a run out here when nobody is around. Sure, it's a temptation, but it's against the law. Well, a little dog like that isn't going to harm anybody. No, but he may kill squirrels. Well now, I think you're taking this a little bit too seriously. I'll tell you what you do. You just let him run back over that hill there where I can't see him and we'll forget all about it. Now I'm really going into this in quite some detail as this story has saved me more times than I can count. So Del goes on to analyze this by writing. If we know we're going to be rebuked anyhow, isn't it far better to beat the other person to it and to do it ourselves? Say about yourself all the derogatory things you know the other person is thinking or wants to say or intends to say and say them before that person has the chance to say them. And lastly, my eagerness to criticize myself took all the fight out of him. Now having screwed up as many times as I have personally, this time I can do one better than Del and I'd like to offer you a formula for apologizing. This is particularly useful for written apologies which are particularly hard to craft and especially hard to get right. The three steps of an effective and truly sincere apology are ownership, consequences and solution. Ownership, it was entirely my fault. I'm to blame here. Matthew's dad, who a guy named Steve was once doing some work with a very buttoned up formal insurance brokerage and he sent an email around to their entire team the subject line of which was my big fat cock up. Great way for taking ownership. Consequences, here are all of the horrible things that are now going to happen as a result of my mistake. Both the things that are now going to go wrong with the company and the things you're probably going to want to do to me because I made this screw up. Solution, but if you'll give me the chance, here is how I would like to put things right. Now notice that these three steps are the complete opposite of human nature and what we would reflexively do. Instead of taking ownership, you'd look to blame the nearest person. Instead of outlining the consequences, you try to sweep them under the rug and act like everything is okay. And then because you're acting like everything is okay, you don't feel the impetus to put forward a solution. Now here's why that's very dangerous. Hello 21 convention viewers. I hope you're enjoying the video. I put this talk together asking the question, how can you deliver as much as possible to the person you're working with? But there's an entire other side to how can you gain as much personally from the experience as possible. And so I've put together an entirely separate guide on this, the nine steps to getting the most out of a work position. You can find this at edwarddruse.com forward slash 21. That's Edward Druse, D-R-U-C-E forward slash 21. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the video. It's particularly cowardly to not take ownership and you'll really lose respect from your employer if you don't go on to do this. Not only that, it's a big red flag to show that you probably haven't learned anything from the mistake. Consequences, if you work with smart people, they'll put two and two together and they'll figure out all of the things that went wrong. Perhaps not right away, but eventually they will and it will really erode your trust with that person if you have tried to hide it. Either that or they'll think you're incompetent for not having realized all of the things that would go wrong. And then lastly, solution. If you haven't offered anything here, people will think everything is okay and they'll continue to pile work on top of you so you'll be having to put out this crisis in secret and do your regular workload. You'll make more and more mistakes and dig yourself into an ever deeper hole. Now going back to this trip in New York, I was also helping Matthew put on a tour event that should be an event for about 400 people. And because it was right at the end of the trip and immediately following the book launch as well as the TV show coming out, we hadn't really thought about it very much and it kind of got us by surprise. And so I show up to the venue on the Saturday morning when the event is scheduled to take place and I quickly realized that everything that could conceivably be wrong with a venue for our sort of event is wrong with this venue. It's an eighth floor dance studio that has this tiny rickety lift that can take about three people so our entire audience has to go up eight flights of stairs. When they get there there are these two enormous pillars right in the middle of the room so most of the audience's view is somewhat obscured. It has no windows and no air conditioning and it's a boiling hot day. And because all of the press that Matthew's had, we have 200 additional people show up for whom we have absolutely no seats. Now this isn't like going along to see a stand-up comic or something for an hour and where you'd be okay to stand. Matthew sometimes speaks for six or seven hours so we had these sweaty people just sat at the very back. Now the kicker was that we had promised everybody that we would be doing a book signing but could just come out and so it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. But the venue told us as soon as we had arrived we have a completely hard stop at six o'clock. You're not allowed to go over and everyone has to be out by then which meant that we weren't able to do that and for anyone who's ever been to see Matthew you know he's not somebody who likes to stay to schedule he likes to go as long as he possibly can. So this left us without anywhere to do a venue. So I assigned myself the task as soon as things were settled down as much as they were ever going to to go down onto the Manhattan pavement or sidewalk as you might say over here and to see if I could find a place where we could do the book signing. I walked a few buildings down and I found a bit of a swanky hotel. So I went in and I said to the receptionist thinking about what's the selling point here and I say we're doing an event just a few buildings up. We have 600 single women. Can we possibly bring them here to do a book signing for an hour? It's a bit of a strange request. The guy's a bit disbelieving but I take him around to the venue up the rickety lift and I show him the events that we're putting on. Somewhat motivated by this he goes back and puts on a case to his manager for why they should let us do this. Now at this point we have absolutely no budget for doing this but I say to him if you're able to frame it as a way of us really being a boon for your bar and restaurant we can use this as a holding area and then take people through. I thought I'd give him some ammunition to go and negotiate the position. Amazingly the manager said yes and he came out and he took me not just to any room but their penthouse conference room. This was up in a very grand lift that could take about 50 people and it was just an amazing room that was perfect. He said we'll have some extra staff members here see you at six o'clock. So I went back with the good news to tell Matthew and I slipped him a note on stage and said this is where we'll be doing the book signing. You can announce it to everyone, it's absolutely fine. So he did. And as the event was wrapping up I thought I'd run down to be there when everyone arrived to be able to welcome them and take them through. But the manager came down and said we've just had a call from central office and they told us we can't do it without charging you for the room. It's $5,000 for an hour. Now as soon as he says these words women start teeming into the bar and restaurants about to queue up and not quite knowing what to do I dash back to see if I can somehow find Matthew. I start kind of fighting up currents up the stairwell and I'm able to find Matthew just a few floors up and I have to prize him to one side away from some of his fans and admirers. And I think my exact words were I've effed up royally and Matthew very calmly perhaps more out of exhaustion than any kind of equanimity at this point very calmly says, what have you done? I say the venue screwed us a little bit. They want $5,000 to use the room. At this point we're just about getting down onto the pavement and Matthew says, no problem, we'll just do it here. He takes off his bags, puts them on the floor, turns to the nearest woman next to him and just starts signing her book in the middle of the street. We're able somehow to form a somewhat orderly line and we just take over this entire pavement but I have to run back into the hotel and say to all of the women who are queuing up in the bar Matthew's just been mobbed in the streets. We're not doing it here anymore, you'll have to go out in line and find him there. The lesson that I take from this is that if you run your mistakes and you announce them loud and proud, the people that you work with will very often be forgiving and they'll work with you to find a suitable solution sometimes the kind of which you otherwise would never have seen yourself. As one last point on this topic of apologizing, I want to try and offer you something that will mitigate the number of mistakes that you make. It's impossible to eliminate the number and you'll still make plenty but this will help just a little. At times, the person that you work with will likely make completely unreasonable requests. Now this usually isn't because they're a completely unreasonable person but rather that they don't know everything that you have on your plate or they don't quite understand the complexity of something that they've asked you to do. When this happens, it's really your responsibility to vocalize this and to communicate it. And I actually wanna give you a line that you can use to do so with maximum grace and poise and to minimize the chances of a Elon Musk-like blow-up. The line is this. I would rather disappoint in expectation and deliver than promise the world and crumble. I'd rather disappoint in expectation and deliver than promise the world and crumble. And when you say these words, someone will be very understanding and they'll work with you to try and find a solution whether that's getting you some additional support whether that's moving the deadline back a little bit perhaps reducing the scope of the project. But it's on you to communicate this and communicate it, you must. Now for our third killer strategy, I want to talk about money. And I wanna take what's already quite an unpopular topic and I wanna argue for a rather unpopular position. But before I do, I'll firstly lay the groundwork for my argument with a mindset that I hope you will all agree with me on. When starting out in your career, your objective, your North Star, your Modus operandi in everything that you do should not be to try and make as much money as you can. Should not be to try and maximize your freedom in terms of schedule and being able to work from anywhere. Should not be trying to minimize the number of hours that you work and get away with as little as possible. All of this talk of passive revenue streams and are you trading time for money? These things do not apply to you in your 20s. Your objective should simply be to maximize learning and experience. You're not trading time for money, you're trading time for experience. And in your 20s, there's no better trade in the game to make. Now when I was researching the book marketing, I came across a discussion between the authors, Neil Strauss and Tim Ferriss for the online education platform Creative Live. And they were discussing their differing philosophies when it comes to book advances. Tim's was quite simple, go for the biggest advance you can, get as much money as you can and have your publisher invested in the process. But Neil's was quite different. He said, I want to write a lot of books and I think Neil has gone on to write 9, 10, maybe 11 books. And therefore I'm looking to develop a relationship with my publisher. And because of this, I don't really care about the advance. I just want to write a lot of books. It's interesting to note in the years since that Tim Maywell have come around to Neil's way of thinking. Writing on the topic of podcast sponsorship earlier this year, and so you can see all of my research coming full circle here, Tim writes, I want to convert casual listeners into die-hard fervent listeners and I want to convert casual sponsors into die-hard fervent sponsors. This requires two things, playing the long game and strategically leaving some chips on the table. The podcast over-delivers for sponsors, partially because I undersell downloads. If, hypothetically, I get one million downloads, I might only guarantee and charge for 750,000 downloads. Undersell and over-deliver. It's simply the best long-term play. Now, in boxing and in mixed martial arts and really any other combat sports with weight classes, we have this idea of the pound for pound champion, the champion of all the various different champions who is thought to be the best. It's only a theoretical idea. There's no way to morph Floyd Mayweather with Vladimir Klitschko and have them duke it out on a level playing field, but it's an interesting thought experiment. And I think there's an analogy to draw here when it comes to money. If we were to try and construct an equation for job security, I think it would look a little bit like value added divided by paycheck commanded, kind of how hard is your punch divided by how much do you weigh? Now, with initiative, you'll be maximizing the amount of value that you add as much as possible, but you will be making plenty of mistakes. And early on in your career, you'll have some real life trepidations. You'll be going through first heartbreaks, heartaches, or perhaps lack thereof. You'll be going through managing your energy, learning to wake up when the alarm goes off and just not get run down and sick. And so I would advise that you give yourself just a little bit of wiggle room, a little bit of buffer. And you don't ask for as much as you might be able to. Now, the pound for pound idea, this works as a perfect analogy where I'm from in the UK with our sterling currency, the pound, but we might say the dollar for dollar champion. You won't know what everyone else in your company is otherwise making, but who is the dollar for dollar champion? Who is the best investments in terms of all of the employees? You want that to be you. Job security doesn't really care how much you make. You could make 10 million, but if you bring in 100 million worth of business, you're quite secure and likewise you could charge 10,000, but if you only bring in 10,000, you're potentially not so secure. So be a pound for pound champion. Now, just in case you disagree with me entirely on this, and you say, Ed, this is nice and all, but I want to go for the biggest paycheck I possibly can. In the interest of leaving no stone unturned, I'll tell you how to do that as well. When most people seek a pay rise, this is what they do. They say, here is all of the tremendous work I've done over the last six to 12 months. I would like a pay rise. Now, this is okay, it sometimes works, but it's not as good as it could be. Here's what you need to do. You need to say, here is all of the tremendous work I've done, and here are all of the things I would like to do in the next six to 12 months. Here is an exact plan of action that I'd like to carry out, and I'd like to speak about an adjustment in remuneration to be able to carry it out. So that's what you do to get a pay rise. You project a forward-looking vision and you sell them on that relating to their dream. Now, as our fourth and final killer strategy, I'd like to talk about preparation and really mastering the updates in terms of preparation. In the book marketing world, we'll return there one more time, there's a very pervasive mindset that if I write a really good book, it will become this big best seller. Sadly, that rarely, if ever happens. If you want a book that sells very well, you firstly have to write a very good book and then you have to market it effectively. There's a parallel here in how people treat their careers. They think my work should speak for itself. It's a nice idea, but I'm here to tell you, again sadly, it's not always that simple. You have to both do great work and you have to learn to market it effectively in terms of internal communication with your team. Now, the forum for which you'll usually be allowed to do this, it's going to be a meeting. And I came to learn of the importance of preparation for meetings and going along to see a speech myself with Jordan Belfort, the real life wolf of Wall Street. This is a day to go and learn about his straight line persuasion sale system. And about halfway through the day, Jordan decided that he would play a clip from the film and for those of you who have seen it, it won't come as any surprise as to what the clip was. It was Leonardo DiCaprio going into a rather beleaguered and amateurish penny stock trading firm and a bit bewildered by the state of the place. He sits down at his desk, he picks up the telephone, he dials the first telephone number on his call sheet and launches into what must be one of the most wonderfully manipulative sales pitches in all of cinema history. The entire office around him shrouds down in silence to hear the magic words that he is spelling. And as soon as he is done, he sells I think $10,000 of Eritain international stock. He gently puts the receiver down and begins filling out his sales form as if nothing has happened. Jordan pauses the clip and returns on stage to a rapturous round of applause. And he goes on to say that in real life, it happened almost exactly like that. The book, the film was based on the book and for that particular scene, the dialogue is taken almost verbatim from the book. It happened almost exactly like that. There was just one key distinction, just one minor difference. Scorsese had forgotten to include the two hours of preparation that Jordan had spent reading about the company and scripting an exact word for word script that he would simply just read when he got on the phone. Now further to this, Jordan went on to say that when he was first interviewing for a Wall Street firm, part of the interview was to read a briefing document about a company to kind of go into a back room and read about it, then come back into the interview and pitch the stock. Now most people, they would get the sheets, they would go into the back room, they'd spend 10 or 15 minutes reading it once, perhaps even rehearsing it, and they'd go back in and they'd pitch the company. Jordan, on the other hand, spent three hours in the back room preparing what he was going to say. Now you might think this would work against him, the interviewer had to come back in several times and say, Mr. Belfort, is everything okay? You're spending rather a long time going through this exercise. He said, no, no, I just need a few more minutes just polishing up what I'm going to say. Now unbeknownst to Jordan, the interviewer was under strict instructions to say no to everything, to just keep saying no and to just break the interviewee down. Jordan goes in after this three hour preparation session and somehow makes the interviewer say yes, break rank and say yes. Now I'm not in any way suggesting that you need to be spending two or three hours in preparation for every status update, but you should be preparing. Not culture at the moment, there's this idea that winging it is cool. If you go into a meeting, that if you go into an interview, you even stand up on stage to give a speech. If you wing it, you're cool. If you're flying by the seat of your pants, no, that's not cool. What's cool is making the sale. What's cool is landing the job. What's cool is absolutely bossing a meeting because you know exactly what you're going to say. That's cool. And so I want to let you in on a more effective and time efficient way that you'll be able to prepare ahead of your meetings. Never assume that just because you've been working on something for a number of days, maybe a number of weeks or months, that you know how to talk about it and make it relatable and talk about it concisely. It's very useful to go and actually write about what you're doing. And so the tool I want to share with you is one called free writing. And I learned about this from a book, Accidental Genius by Mark Levy. And it's a very simple exercise. It's opening up a Word document, setting a timer for 10, perhaps 15 minutes, and just writing in this stream of consciousness like way as fast as you can, not worrying about spelling, not worrying about grammar, and just throwing words up on the page with this topic in mind to see what comes out. I'm sure you all know the old Mark Twain saying that I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead. It's kind of that applied to conversation. You're getting all of the waffle out on the page so you can just go in with a few very precise things and you know exactly what you're going to go in and say. Even someone who's very good at improvisation, they're very quick on their feet, they still have to talk themselves to the good points. On the other hand, if you've gone through this exercise, you won't have to go in and memorize anything. You won't even have to read over what you've written. You'll just have the precise points that you can go in with and you'll have them as the headline. By the way, this almost entirely eliminates umming and a-ring, and it gets rid of that horrible feeling of being in the shower the following morning and thinking, I wish I'd said that. You won't really have that because you'll have prepared in your mind. So that prepares you for meetings, but what about the ambush? If you work with a particularly driven personality type, you'll soon learn that they don't really adhere to schedules or conventional functions in that kind of way and they'll tend to kind of tap you on the shoulder or give you a call out of the blow and you'll get the dreaded question. So, what have you been working on? I used to just hate this. I really used to hate this. I don't know how many of you used to watch The Simpsons. Perhaps still do watch The Simpsons. We'll be watching The Simpsons for many years to come. But there's one scene where Mr. Burns was going to get a health check and the doctor sits him down after running all of his labs and says, Mr. Burns, I'm not quite sure how to tell you this, but you have every disease known to man. Not only that, we've discovered some entirely new diseases just in studying you. Mr. Burns says, I see. What can we do about this? The doctor says, well, here's the thing. And he brings out this toy door, these little toy bugs. He says, there are so many diseases that they can't kind of get through and there's just this jam. Mr. Burns hears this and says, so what you're saying is, I'm indestructible. And he jumps off the hospital desk, says, I'm indestructible, and presses out with smithers in tow. Now this can happen when you get the question. You've done everything you were ever assigned to do and you've even discovered a few new things and you've done those too. But you get the question, it's like this door, you can't think of a single one. And this happened to me again and again and again and again. And this isn't a trivial thing. If you work with busy people, those few minutes you get with them, that might be your only time that you get to spend with them that week or even that month, perhaps sometimes. And you're screwing it up every time you're getting the chance to meet with them. And so I was racking my brains thinking, what can I do to stop this from happening? And I came across a solution. It's a wonderfully simple solution. I give you the post-it notes on the desk technique. It's very simple, you take a post-it notes like so and you put it to one side of your desk, perhaps even to the side of your laptop so when you pick it up and walk around with it, you have it there as well. This is not a to-do list, this is not a schedule, this is not project management. It's sole purpose is to report notable things so that when you get that tap on the shoulder, you get that phone call out of the blue, you can grab your post-it note, you can say, here are the three things that I need to update you on. So much of mastering the updates is really just having the key facts and figures at the tips of your fingers at all times. That's really all you have to do. Now there's one final point on this. When you've really been going through a hard time, you've been screwing up your performances, you've been dipped for whatever reason. It's very important to communicate effectively with the person you're working with and I want to read a line from Bill Walsh, the three-time Super Bowl winning coach of the San Francisco 49ers. This is from his book, The Score Takes Care of Itself and he's talking about keeping the team's owners informed. You want them to understand that you are applying maximum efforts and paying attention to every single solitary detail of their investments. So in your case, this is likely just their paycheck in you. This will buy you time to prove yourself. Positive results, winning, count most, but until those results come through your door, a heavy dose of documentation relating to what you have done are doing and planning to do may buy you enough time to actually do it. Flood them with information and status updates. This is really, really important when you're going through that particularly hard time. Now when I was 13 years old, like I suspect many of you in this room, I went to see the film 300 and like many of you as well, I assume, as soon as the film was over, I took to the internet to see, how can I become as jacked as King Leonidas? Yeah, you know this well. I don't know how far you got, but I was able to track down the blog of Mark Twight, who is the trainer for the cast with his rather abruptly named training facility, Jim Jones, but in a 2006 article, paying for time, Mark writes, the other day, a hypothetical situation arose in conversation. If you had five minutes with the best coach in the world, what would you ask them? Personally, I would ask nothing. I would socialize. I would show that I am interesting, inquisitive, intelligence committed, and that I've done a lot of work already. I might ask about their family and their interests outside of sports training, but I might not. In short, I would use those five minutes to make sure that I got another 10 and then use those 30 to earn, sorry, I've messed up with this quite entirely. I would use those first five minutes to make sure that I got another 10 and then use those 10 minutes to earn another 30. By the time I had earned enough time with him, I might realize the questions that I had are irrelevant and the picture is far bigger than the means I was so curious about before. Now, if you're able to land a work position with somebody that you admire, perhaps as an internship, perhaps through the informal means, which I outlined in my first talk at the 21 convention, the temptation will be to seize the opportunity and to ask all of the questions you possibly can, but I encourage you not to do that. Instead, use those first two weeks to get two more weeks and use those two more weeks to get three and use those three to get five and use those five to make yourself utterly indispensable to that person's organization. You don't have to know what to do with your life. All that's required to have a fulfilling career is to give your very best with the projects that are immediately in front of you. If you do this, more will come and if you do this consistently, your career will largely take care of itself. Now, I'll conclude as I opened with a quote from Cheryl Sandberg. Careers are not ladders. Those days are long gone, but jungle gyms. Don't just move up and down. Don't just look up. Look back ways, backwards, sideways around corners. Your career and your life will have starts and stops and zigs and zags. Don't stress out about the white space, the path you cannot draw, because therein lies both the surprises and the opportunities. That is how you start your career. Thank you very much. All right, thank you, Ed Druse. Let's get some questions going on. Yes, brilliant speech. I just had a question about the job security part, the portion that you did. You talk about value added versus paycheck demanded, and you also say that being an innovator or in an upstart, you're gonna make mistakes. I would logically presume that the cost incurred by those mistakes is added onto your paycheck demanded and put against your value. My question is, is there an effective method that you've found for being able to predict going into one company or another based on your knowledge in that field or what have you of what amount of cost you incur and how much value you would need to add to see if this is a viable experience for you to partake in, or if it's something you need to study more before you enter? I'll firstly just say that the mistake that you make, if I make a $10,000 mistake for Matthew, and I've made plenty, you don't expect for that to be docked from your paycheck. That's not really how it works, but in terms of having the buffer there to allow you the freedom to make mistakes, that's more what I'm getting at. And particularly when you have initiative and you're moving forward at pace with your own projects, you'll make a lot of mistakes. And I think if you just lower the bar to where you're not on the kind of axe the minute they're looking to get rid of employees or the minute that you make a mistake, I'll just say that you wouldn't believe the number of people I've seen negotiate themselves out of golden learning opportunities simply because they want as much money as they can right away. It's far better to play the long game, but I wouldn't be just to the latter part of your question too hesitant about a lot of preparatory study before going into something, go and learn it on the job. I began at 17, I knew nothing. You'll be able to pull that off if you're enthusiastic and persistent. Hey, how did you, at 17 years old, how did you get into contact with Matthew Halsey and how did you just get into that? I'd highly suggest you watch my earlier talk as I basically, it's an hour long response to that question. Is that online? Yeah, you can find it on YouTube, just search how to find a mentor in business. 2014, 21 convention speech. You can find that on 21university.com. One second. All right, first off, I want to say incredible speech that was really well thought out. I want to go back to when you were saying about the apologizing. For the written apology, you were saying, take ownership, explain the consequences and do the solutions. Could you go into more depth into the variances, like giving a very quick apology to a boss who doesn't spend a lot of time and having to explain to him why something went wrong? Would you follow those three steps or try to explain more? You certainly want to be outlining why something happened and that plays to a big part of what I was saying about people not taking ownership that when you don't take ownership, you really show that you've not taken on the lesson. So I think a big part of the solution is, and you're right to highlight this, not just here's how I'm going to put things right in terms of the immediate effect, but here's how I'm gonna show that this won't happen again. And I've learned my lesson. So I think that's a really crucial point of the apology as well to kind of add as an addendum to that. Hey, I saw your first speech live and I thought it was one of the best of the conference. I'm gonna turn things around for you. How does someone who's got a pretty good business find a remarkable young man like you? How would you recommend someone goes about that? The biggest thing I've found, and I do a lot of the recruitment for Matthew as well, I've taken his company from four to 30 people. The biggest thing if you look around Upwork for remote positions or Craigslist here in the UK for in-person things, just go and read some job boards and they are the most dull, dry, boring things that you can possibly imagine. And again, like I was saying with the kind of copywriting exercise in terms of putting ideas forward, you need to see your job proposal as copy. It has to really be persuasive. I was recently helping Matthew find a new personal assistant and I was able to get several hundred responses just because I spent about four hours carefully crafting that proposal. I think people just kind of get things a bit back to front in terms of interviewing. They rush the proposal, they don't get people through the door, they just complain that there's nobody good. Really put the work in to make a compelling job advert and promote that as widely as you can and we now do not have any trouble in finding people even when not putting forward the brand name or anything like that, even just posting on places like Craigslist and that book. Just see it as copy and I think you'll have a much better time. Hi, I have a question about apologizing as well. Okay. So, I think when I'm off the record, I do a lot of just saying that, saying how what I did was wrong and stuff but then once things have to go on record, I end up trying to blame other people. And on the record you mean in writing? Yeah, in writing. Okay. So, what's your stance on that? Just be as, just nip it in the butt as much as you possibly can. All of my screw up emails, but as I was saying about Matt's dad, Steve, the subject line was my big fat cock up. I think just put it in the subject line, just like announce it, just get it out the way. I've screwed up big time or I've screwed up royally. Just put that in the subject line and the rest will come from there. So, just pierce the bubble right away and just get it out. Yeah. All right guys, that's all the time we have for questions, let's give it up for Ed Druse. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for watching the full talk and getting all the way to the end. I really appreciate it. For more videos and talks like this, subscribe to the 21 Convention YouTube channel by clicking the big red button somewhere on this page. If you'd like to find out more about me, head over to eduarddruse.com. That's eduarddruse, the R-U-C-E dot com. Thank you.