#487: BEST OF - Transform Your MINDSET, Transform Your LIFE with Steven Bartlett, Krista Mashore, Amjad Masad, Dileep Thazhmon, Martin Villig, Ankush Grove, Jerrod Blandino, & Colin O’Brady

We can be and become anything that we set our minds to through diligence and hard work of saying, I might not be this right now, but a fixed mindset says, I might not be this right now, and I will never be this ever. But being able to claim that in the identity, I am this, a possible mindset says the possibilities are limitless.
Come on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow.

That's a no-see. I'm ready for my close-up.
Happy New Year. Have you created your resolutions yet? If you need a little help in getting you into a mindset that will challenge you to dream bigger than ever before, then this is what I have for you.
Today's episode features some of my most successful guests in business who weren't afraid to dream big and then take the necessary bold action. Remember, they took the messy action.
It's your turn now, my friend. If you can dream it, you can create it.
I truly believe that. Don't forget, if you need a hand, you need some accountability and you wanna be a part of a team that's with you.
So you don't need to go it alone. Click the link in the show notes below.
You're going to find the opportunity to sign up for my group coaching. Jump in now before it's too late.
All right. This episode is going to walk you through how you can just go bigger.
2025, it's your year. Meet a different guest each week.
How do other entrepreneurs know when is it right to just focus on one thing versus diversify? Yeah, so in our portfolio, so Flight Group is our holding company. We have 41 different companies and I'd say we have significant operational involvement in about five of them, but there's 41 in total.
Some of them are more passive investments. Some of them we might have a 20 or 30% stake in, and then some of them we have a majority position in.
The key thing, to answer your question, is a company by definition of the word is group of people. So for me, when I got to the point in my life where I had the leverage, the resources to hire exceptional people and delegate, that's when I knew I could do more than one thing.
And Richard Branson, who I met in New York, and I went to an event with him, and then I interviewed him for a couple of hours, is the absolute master of this. He said to me, because he's dyslexic, so he struggles with reading, and he's not particularly good at maths in his own words, he said to me, I've always had to ask who, not how.
And this is like, my girlfriend started a business, it does like breathwork and meditation. And I remember walking in the front room and watching her for seven hours, try and figure out how to build a website.
And that for me is almost a metaphor from what I see from entrepreneurs. They spend so much time, they waste so much time doing things that they are not good at.
What Richard Branson taught me is business is about effective delegation. Richard Branson, in his 50s, ran one of the biggest groups in Europe, right? And he told me about a meeting he had at 50 years old, runs one of the biggest groups in Europe, where he sat in the meeting and his CFO says, Richard, do you know what's going on? He goes, he's like, no.
His CFO takes him out of the room, draws a picture of an ocean, and then draws a picture of a net in the ocean, and then puts some fishies in the net, and goes, Richard, this is what net profit is. Net profit is the fishies here in the net.
At this point, Richard is running one of the biggest groups in Europe, and he doesn't know what net profit is, because he's been such a good delegator for his entire career that he doesn't really need to know a bunch of stuff. He's so good at finding people and giving them responsibility.
In this season of my life, that is what I'm doing. I'm finding exceptional individuals.
I'm spending about 20 hours a week of my time on recruitment, and I'm empowering them to start companies. Again, I've researched this really, really deeply.
I've interviewed Walter Isaacson, who followed Elon Musk for two years, and he followed Steve Jobs pretty much until the day he died and I asked him, I said, what's their secret? He said, specifically in the case of Steve Jobs he said, you know Steve, I was in the backyard with Steve Jobs before he died and I asked him a question, I said, what's the best product you ever built at Apple? Steve turned to me and went, the team he goes, that's the most important thing he goes, iPhone's great, the Mac is great, but the best product I ever made at Apple was the team. By definition of the word company is group of people.
And if you play out this thought experiment, if any of you had managed to hire Elon Musk and get the best out of him, you would be the benefactor of trillions of dollars. So I think through that lens, my job is to find the next A player.
And that's why I went from spending one hour a week of my time on hiring and recruitment. Now I spend 20 hours of my week.
All of you, both personally and professionally, are in the recruitment business. It is going to be the single biggest defining factor of where you end up personally and professionally.
What big regret do you have? The big professional regret I have is knowing that someone was wrong for my company or team and taking too long to make a decision about it. Because again, I wrote about some of the research in my book, but the impact that a negative member of your team has is three to four times the positive impact a good member of your team has.
And a nice thought experiment for you guys to think about when you're trying to understand if an existing member of your team is good, or when you're hiring someone and you're trying to figure out if they're a good team member, is ask yourself this question. If everyone in the team was like them in terms of attitude, cultural values, i.e.
alignment with the company culture, would the overall average be raised, maintained, or lowered? Both me and both Amazon have a policy which we call bar raises. Every single person that we hire should raise the bar.
They should raise the average. Now think about one person you work with professionally and ask yourself the question, if everyone in your company was like them in terms of attitude and cultural values, I'm not saying lived experience, we need diversity, attitude and cultural values, would the average be raised, maintained or lowered? If it would be lowered considerably, you should get rid of that individual.
If it would be maintained, maybe that's the case to train the individual. If it would be raised, that's the type of individual you need to promote.
Because companies don't have one culture. They typically have as many cultures as they have managers.
So in my previous business, we probably had about 30 or 40 managers, and we had 30 or 40 cultures, really. Because I remember one day speaking to Jason's team, and they're all so happy.
Best company they've ever worked for. Then I spoke to a team that sat next to Jason's team, and they're all on their way out the door.
They're about to quit. So you want your best people, the real sort of cultural disciples, as high as you possibly can in the organization.
And that's what we call the bar razor test. I think, and I've done a lot of research on this, you can correlate someone's success in life to one metric more than others, and that metric is their personal and professional failure rate.
If you want to increase your chance of success, you basically have to increase your rate of failure. And I've studied many a great entrepreneur from Jeff Bezos to Thomas Watson from IBM to entrepreneurs that I know and have interviewed like the founder of Airbnb and Daniel Ek, who's a good friend of mine, the founder of Spotify.
What they all share in common is they understand that failure is feedback, feedback is knowledge and knowledge is power. So when I think about my own life and I reflect on my own failings or my own experimentation rate, leaving school at 16 years old, quitting university after one lecture, starting a company and resigning after two years, starting another business and resigning after five years, I have a very fast rate of experimentation.
And that means that I think I've managed to acquire a lot of information very quickly. And that's reflected in the companies that I build.
So in the companies that I build now, we have a head of failure. We have a head of experimentation.
And I think there's probably some background context I need to give you here, which is the world is going to change at such a quick rate. You'll see this when you walk around here and you get to see some of the technology, that your question as an individual, but also as a company should be, how am I going to acquire information quickly? And how am I going to acquire valuable information quickly? It's not going to come from books.
If you listen to the futurists, they'll tell you that in the 21st century, we'll experience a rate of change that is 20,000 times the previous century. So the way that you acquire information, whether you're an individual or a company, is you increase your rate of experimentation.
You conduct more experiments. And so for something that's easy to understand, like a podcast, that means we conduct 30 or 40 experiments every week on everything.
on the title, the length of the title, different colors, adding an exclamation mark, adding quotation marks, the temperature of the room, the amount of CO2 in the room when you do an interview. We take this absolute scientific approach to finding the answer, which is accelerating your rate of failure.
And if you speak to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, he'll tell you the same thing. He says, Amazon has to be the best place on earth to fail.

Nine of those failures will end up in the graveyard.

But the one that is successful, the AWS, will pay for the entire graveyard.

And the world we're moving into, it's going to be increasingly more important

that your team is set up to conduct fast experiments.

Meet a different guest each week. Are you not entertained? Confidence clear.
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Select podcast in the survey and be sure to select our show in the drop-down menu that follows. I've studied a lot of brain research and I am obsessed with the way the brain works.
And so I've always, I've known that it's harder for me and I have to work on it. So I'm always looking for skills, like different ways to make, be successful because people will always be like, teach me how to build a million dollar funnel.
It's like, I can't teach you that until you get your mind right. So there's a strategy called stop, snap, and switch.
And what it is, is we have between 30,000 and 70,000 thoughts a day that run through our mind. Research shows that about 85% of those thoughts are negative.
And so when you can identify the negative thoughts, because energy goes where focus flows, what you think about actually happens. The neurotransmitters in your brain does not know the difference between what you think and reality.
So if you're constantly thinking, I'm tired, I'm too old, I don't have any energy, I'm not good with technology, I can't do this, right? The brain goes, okay, you're right. And it doesn't look for ways to help you overcome that.
So

if you can recognize what you're saying and train your brain to start thinking about good things,

recognizing good things, seeing your successes. And I call it stop.
Like when you have a negative

thought, like, oh my gosh, I am who in the heck would ever leave their career, their, their career

47 to change careers, right? That's a negative thought. I was, that happened to me when I was 47, I decided I wanted to become a coach.
I was making about $1.000,000 a year as a real estate agent. And I was told that I was crazy to do that because no one's going to listen to you at 47 and normal people at 47 don't leave their successful career to do something different.
Not a good idea. And so what I said was, I thought, okay, I've been doing this for, you know, 17 years.
I'm very good at it. I was successful at that.
If I was successful at that, I could be successful at this. So you have to stop and recognize the negative thought.
The negative thought was, who the heck is going to listen to you, Krista? You don't have a list. You're just the girl who wet the bed until she was 10 and couldn't read until fifth grade because of the abuse.
Like, you don't have enough knowledge. What are you going to say? You don't have a following.
I had to change those thoughts into stop and stop recognizing and go, no, because of your success, right?

You stop and you snap, stop the record. You recognize the thought, you stop it, you snap the bracelet and you switch it over the other hand.
You say the opposite of the negative thought. It's called stop, snap, and switch.
If you do that, anybody, I guarantee you do it, have your kids do it, have your spouse do it. Have your friends do it.
Like stop, snap and switch. You will be amazed at how you can train your brain to start working for you.
And so now when things happen or the fear comes up or the negative thoughts, it's more like moments or minutes, sometimes a little longer depending on how bad it is, right? Instead of days, hours, weeks, months, years kind of a thing. So do you get nervous or are there like tips that you can give everyone listening? How, when you're doing something for the first time, how do you ensure that you have success? Here's how you assure you have success is that you just don't stop.
I think I would have been more fearful if I didn't start this. I feel like the universe has my back so much because the real estate market right now with the recession, we were on track last February, like a year and a half ago, we did $4 million in one month.
So we were on track to start doing two, $3 million months. Well, then the market crashed and interest rates went to 7%.
There's no inventory. There's a recession.
So I am so glad that I took the risk and took the leap of faith because I think I'd be more nervous now if I didn't have this. This is going to end up being bigger than my other coaching business.
I know it is, right? Because we've helped hypnotists. We've helped people that are teaching investings, people teaching leadership, public speaking.
We've taught all these different businesses tapping, like, you know, how to do really, really well. And so, yes, I was scared to death, but I have learned to stop, snap and switch.
I've learned like, Krista, keep going, like, stop saying that to yourself. That's not serving you right.
It's you're not, those thoughts are not training your brain to help you. I stopped, snap and switch my way right out of it.
Because trust me, there's been plenty of times, like every day where I'm like, ah, to just turn that little negative voice. I call it the bad wolf, the amygdala.
I got to shut it off. Tell us a little bit about getting into the coaching, starting that business, the digital marketing, and how you've scaled it massively in the past couple of years.
I became a good realtor by utilizing digital marketing, social media, and video to dominate my market. I became a marketer instead of just an agent.
And it worked like crazy good for me. So I thought to myself, that's what I have to do in coaching.
And mind you, when I did this, literally my family said, Krista, you're crazy. You shouldn't do this.
It's not a good idea. Are you sure? I'm so glad I didn't listen to them because it took me 14 years as a real estate agent to break the million dollar mark.
And I did it in 11 months in the coaching spirit, utilizing, and now we're doing million dollars a month. We've had, we've done over a million dollars a month, the past 31 months in a row right now, during a recession, during an economy, during it all by taking the risk, taking the leap of faith.
But it's because I come from an educational basedbased marketing standpoint. I'm a marketer first.
I love digital marketing. I love funnels.
And if you're somebody right now, you are trying to break out there. You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable, number one, but you've got to get comfortable being in front of people and being yourself and letting people see the real you and exposing yourself to people.
Like I've, attention. And that's how I've kind of gone about the whole digital marketing aspect of it is I'll put money behind running ads just to get my face in front of people without any call to action.
Because research shows it takes about 47 times for someone to see you before they actually click. And the more value that you add, the more you speak directly to someone, the more that they will click.
So instead of asking somebody to download my book in the beginning or to give me their contact information in exchange for a lead magnet, what I do is I just give value, value, value, and then I'll ask them to click. So that has been my strategy and it's worked really, really well for me.
Russell Brunson, in fact, he's the CEO of ClickFunnels. He actually had me talk about that on stage two years ago.
The pre-funnel, like what is your marketing strategy before you drive traffic to your funnel? And that's been the way I did it in real estate and the way that I did it in coaching. Kush, you talk about being a different kind of unicorn.
I know many people, like myself, you want to believe you can drive your business to success overnight. But that hasn't really been the way it's happened for you.
You call yourself, what kind of a unicorn? We call ourselves a slow unicorn. So it took us around 10 years to become a unicorn.
Because we picked up an industry which was not revolutionized by internet. So the restaurant industry started 500 years ago.
So Amazon came, revolutionized something, Uber revolutionized something. But no one did anything in terms of food.
So that's where we picked up at all. There was no playbook to play on.
So we were not any any xyz of india so we build it our own our own learnings a lot of mistakes so we started with one brand on the high street then we went to dark kitchens with one brand then we realized people order mcdonald's never a salad from mcdonald's so each cuisine need need to have one brand. So we started building multi-brand.
And one core value of ours is to challenge the status quo. So we keep challenging the way food business is being run.
So today we operate 400 kitchens from 4 countries 20 brands and we serve 10 million meals a month. That's been our journey.
And recently, we got Wendy's to India. So Wendy's, a 100-year-old company, the first time in the history, they could open 150 locations in span of 18 months.
So that's the kind of scale to bring on. But it took a lot of time for us to understand mistakes, go back, redraw, and a lot of backers and our investors.
So none of our investors ever exited so far. So we have like Sofseco on board, Goldman Sachs, KOTU, QIA.
So it's a long journey, and that's why we call ourselves a slow unicorn. What keeps you going through a long journey? So one very obvious is love for food.
So I love food. And then the other thing is, I think the overall mission is still McDonald's is the world's most valuable food company at $130 billion.
We are just a billion dollar. So we have a lot of canvas to be covered, a lot of things to be done.
We recently entered Saudi, and we know how big Saudi is a market. So we just entered and have three kitchens here.
So ambition is to be the largest in the world. We are already largest, but keep growing and have like 50,000 internet restaurants, around 2,000 locations, and have all the cuisines on board, which we make and serve to our customers.
I love it. Follow your passions and set massive goals.
We keep hearing it. Be courageous.
Embrace failures over and over again. Thank you so much.
I ask you to try to find your passion. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers.
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That's NetSuite.com slash Monaghan. Dilip, to you, what are the most important skills or qualities an entrepreneur needs to have in this day and age? I can talk about myself.
So I think the first thing is you can't almost overthink it. And the number one thing I've seen with founders that don't make it is they kind of analyze it to death.
And the reality is you're going to have 50% information if you're lucky. If you're waiting for 80% or 90% information, someone's already done it.
And so you have to move pretty quickly. And that window that you're building for also moves.
And the biggest thing I've seen is people think it's always there. And they're like, now I'm ready, but that window's already gone.
And like someone else has already done that. And, you know, when we launched, we started in multiple countries and we were shipping U.S.
cards to multiple countries. Now we have licenses in 22 countries.
But if I was waiting for the license to start, we just would never start. Right.
And so it's a balance. You have to be comfortable with that level of risk.
And then the second thing is, I think someone mentioned this here, but you have to enjoy the process, like build something you want to build. Because at the end of the day, you know, the funding, your unicorn, like, none of that's going to get you through when it's hard.
And you have to, like, be like, why are you actually doing this? Because you could probably do a lot of other things. And so if you don't enjoy the process of building, you don't fall in love with the process, the outcome, and everyone wants an outcome.
We're all here if we want an outcome. But if you don't enjoy the process, it's going to be very, very hard to make it and you're probably going to burn out.
And then the last thing that I've seen, and this is something someone told me, but as a founder, you have the most information. And so a lot of times things don't look as good as people tell you it is on the outside, but they're also not probably as bad as you think it is on the inside.
You see everything, right? And part of this is like splitting that up and being like, hey, keeping the balance of your good days are good, your bad days are bad, some days are the same day, but it will change. Tomorrow's a new day, you get another shot.
So you have to like enjoy that process to get to that end point. There's a lot of armchair philosophers out there.
And I would say that's like the number one skill you learn as a founder. You know, I talked earlier about trusting your gut instinct.
There's so much bad advice out there. It's like probably like 90% of the advice is bad.
Even good advice becomes stale. You know, if an investor's been like an operator in the dot-com era, like most of their advice is already still, you know?

And so as a founder,

you just get like massive amount of information,

being able to parse through that

and figuring out what is the good information

and what is the bad or misinformation

and kind of being able to throw that away.

But also just being chill about it.

You don't have to be, you know,

me, Nevada or anything like that.

If your father wants to give you a piece of advice

that's irrelevant, just smile and nod your head.

Thank you so much for that.

Thank you.

Martin, how do you manage your time and energy as a busy leader?

Meaning on the outside, sometimes it looks like all anyone does is work and they're working around the clock.

Is that what it actually is like?

We realized it very early on that building a big company is not a sprint, but it's a marathon.

So you and I deal with yourself. You need to set some certain routines.
Of course, you can do a few all-nighters, but you can't do that all the time. So you need to balance out.
We've tried to get eight hours sleep from whatever, second year onwards, really keep that and also going out doing sports trying to whatever hang out a bit with friends to get your stress off i think this is really really important and the whole mental mindset and things as well so that what do you believe what do you scare off what we discussed today as well so i think this would also say, is one of the biggest maybe game changers which founders are making it and which are breaking it. So trying to set that early on, I think this is crucial.
And I've had tough times as everyone and also, but you have supportive system, your family, your friends as the community, in a sense, who can help you and then give advice, give a boost. I think then you can get through it.
And again, if you have a good mission, step by step, you move towards that, it gives you energy. Amjad, back to you.
What is your biggest regret that you can share with us? My biggest regret, I'm generally not a very regretful person. I generally just go through life and just assume that it is somewhat predestined.
I'm going to make the mistake I'm going to make and just keep going. So I don't recommend regret in general, but I would say the thing that I would have loved to embrace earlier is really trusting my gut instinct.
Every time I've listened to an investor who's otherwise like a very smart and knowledgeable person or really any kind of mentor or anything like that and went against my instincts because I thought, oh, they're an authority. They know what they're doing.
We've made mistakes and we've lost time. And, you know, as I matured as a CEO, I've actually, you know, become a lot more comfortable in my skin in terms of just like being able to make decisions, like really gut-based decisions and not really stressing over decisions a whole lot, changing my mind quite a bit to my chagrin of my team sometimes, where it feels like a little random.
But I think that's really what building a startup is like, is that you need to explore a lot of things. And it's okay, you know, if some of those things don't work out, but don't do things just because you're expected to do them or because someone said something that felt that it was authoritative for you.
So I would say just trusting my instincts. That is so much easier said than done.
For me specifically, and I know I'm sure for a lot of us here, what tips can you give us so that we can lean into it? Because we've all been in that moment where we felt it, but like you said, when you move forward, everyone starts questioning you. How do you overcome that? Well, sometimes you have to be comfortable with taking a bit of a credibility hit for a short period of time.
If really, you know, people on your team are not like really trusting your decision or don't stand it, you have to build a culture where it is disagree and commit, right? Like people on your team need to be able to just say, okay, like I'm not fully on board with this, but I'm just going to go with you. I'm going to trust your decision.
Because otherwise, especially executive teams, if there's a lot of like uncertainty and doubt, it becomes very hard to make these kind of fast and loose decisions. So I think it really comes down to the culture you've built and the team around you.
And you extend this to other people as well. Like if someone's feeling really strongly in your team about something, let them do it and see what comes out of that.
The two secrets to a successful, happy life are gratitude and trust. You have to trust that everything's happening because it's supposed to, and you have to move through it and learn through it and be grateful for it.
Be grateful for the pain you're going through. Be grateful for the struggles and the successes because it's bringing you somewhere you need to go.
You know what I mean? And be grateful for those who love you. And also you need to be a cheerleader for your friends.
When they, when they have a success, when they get a promotion, when they get a new car, you need to be equally, if not more a cheerleader to them. They deserve it.
Jared, one of the things that you did was at the time when you came into the makeup business, it would seem more stiff, more boring. It didn't seem as lively and magical the way that you are.
How were you able to step into a business that was so different than you and be that real you? You know, being completely naive, not having any interest in getting into beauty, falling into it by complete accident allowed me to look at it through my own perspective, my own way. I didn't come in with any preconceived notions.
I walked in and thought, you're all taking this way too seriously. This is fun.
It's so much more fun to be a girl, at least in the 90s. You know, oh my gosh, now boys can express themselves and have some fun, which is so cool.
But at the time I thought, why are you enjoying this? This is like, this is like an adult version of a cramp box. You get to wear, you know, lipstick and bronzer and snatch that brow and get that, you know, blush on.
And I just saw the joy in it. And I thought they were missing it because in the mid to late nineties, it was very rule oriented.
Step one, step two, step three, you know, there, there wasn't YouTube. There wasn't education to that level that allowed people to feel confident in, in trying new things.
So I was like, I'm going to be your gay best friend for 10 minutes. Boo, you come sit down.
We're going to have some fun. And I can be like, who told you that was okay.
Like who told you that weird brown lipstick looked good on you get over here. But I can say that with love because there was no competition.
I was, I was just a gay boy looking at these women with total love and saying, yeah, I'm going to be your best friend for five minutes and let's do this. You know, and through that experience, I started destroying every tester in the department, creating little concoctions that didn't exist for me.
Cause I, I gained a bit of a celebrity clientele. I worked at Saks and there would be, you know, somebody coming in, going to an award show and they, you know, with a makeup artist looking at Brown, you know, whatever I'd be like, no, no, wait, there's this cool Chanel blush with glitter.
Hold on. I would, I would smash it and add it to the, to add it to the eyeshadow and send them home with it, trying to create these things that would, that would allow you to be a little extra that would allow you to get noticed, you know, cause I, all I wanted to be was notice growing up.
And, you know, I think all we want to be is seen and add a little joy to life. You know, you think that after all the success and all of the achievements that you, people might trust you or might go with you, but no, I mean, there's, you're going to get pushed back.
If you're creating something unique, if you're sharing your heart with the world, if you, if you're putting something out there in the world that doesn't exist, you're going to get pushed back. People aren't going to get it.
And I always say, you don't need to get my idea, but you need to get me. You don't need to trust the idea, but you must trust me.
That doesn't mean that, you know, it happens every day. Um, but no, and I'm actually good with it.
I'm good with it. I'm actually better.
When you push against me, I go stronger. You know, the peach palette that broke the internet.
Nobody knows this story. You want me to tell you a little story? So nobody knows this.
We got breaking news here now. All right.
Nobody knows this. Originally the peach palette was a little eight.
Well, it was small. And I had created the chocolate bronzers based on a natural cocoa powder full of antioxidants, beautiful tint.
It was perfect. And so I thought, what else can I do? And I remember this commercial growing up in Southern California about peaches during the summer.
And there was a whole little song that would show these peaches, juicy peaches. And as a kid, I thought, that's so.
It's like yellow and pink and like there's berry tone, just so beautiful. So I thought I'm going to create a peach palette.
And I created this little palette and I put peach essence in it. It smelled like peaches.
And I went into a board meeting and there, you know, there's like 18, 19, like executive salespeople are on the table. And I said, listen, I created this peach palette.
It smells like peaches. And they were like, no, no, no one's going to want their eyeshadow smelling like peaches.
Nobody. And I was like, oh, okay.
So it went from eight to now 18 colors. I made it twice as big and I doubled down on it.
Cause I was like, oh no, no, no. Like I'm thankful for that though.
Cause it pushed me and I made it bigger. And it was one of the most successful products we ever launched.

And even like better than sex, guys, better than sex.

Nobody would allow me to call it better than sex.

No retailers wanted me to put it into a pink tube.

Nobody will buy a pink mascara.

Now there's an entire category of pink mascaras and it's the number one mascara in the United States and across the world.

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That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E dot com slash confidence. now talking about being a beginner, I came back from the solo Antarctica crossing, which I mentioned before.
And there was a lot of press, a lot of acclaim, a lot of people very curious to hear about it, lots of media and all this sort of stuff. I'm very humbled by all of that.
And of course, the question I get most often then is, okay, great, but what's next, right? You know, what's the next big adventure? What's the next big feat? And sometimes I laugh like, yo, I just walked across Antarctica by myself. Like it's been a week, like give me a break.
But of course I am the type of person that is curious about continuing to push my body in unique and interesting ways. And so I started to tell people, Hey, actually, I'm going to go back to Antarctica, but this time I'm going to do it completely differently.
I'm going to go in a rowboat and be like in a rowboat. I said, yeah, you know, nobody in history has ever crossed Drake passage in a rowboat.
So that's from the Southern tip of South America, all the way to Antarctica, 750 miles of open ocean. They say it's the most dangerous ocean crossing in the world because it's got icebergs and there's three oceans, the Atlantic, the Southern Ocean, and Pacific all converging and creating 40-foot swells and really underpredictable currents.
A cruise ship just 10 or 12 years ago in modern times have sunk in the Drake Passage. This is a rough ocean.
And me and a group of others, we're going to attempt to make this crossing with no motor, no sail, just us in a tiny little 28-foot rowboat that's sitting about two feet off the ground. And so people started to hear about this, that I was planning for this project.
And of course, the next immediate question is, cool, so you've been rowing your whole life and you've been sailing and you know everything about the ocean. And as you know from the book, chapter four of the book is the limiting belief, I'm not a fill in the blank, which is to say, oh, well, I can never run a marathon.
I'm not a runner. Or I have this idea for a business, but I'm a lawyer.
I'm not an entrepreneur. So I'm not going to start this business.
Or all the things we say, I'm not a, boom, that's the limiting belief. And I'll tell you what, in this moment, I committed to this row.
I actually pitched it to Discovery Channel, got them to put a few million bucks behind a huge production around this row. And I looked in the mirror and said to myself and my wife's like, well, you do know I've never rowed a boat before, right? Not at summer camp, not like in college.
I have no experience rowing a boat. But that didn't stop me in this moment.
I was like, I am not a rower yet. Yet.
That's the important word there. I am not a rower yet.
And I went and found it as the stories, you know, from the book come goes, and I found this incredible guy to help coach me and teach me, et cetera. But the lesson from this is so important.
I think it's so important for all of us. And I relate to it.
We all relate to it is looking at another group of people or look at somebody's, you know, success and say, well, I couldn't be them. Like they're, they're so skilled at this.
And in the book is some simple advice, but I go, look, you know, there was a time when Kobe Bryant had never shot a basketball. And then he went and dribbled a basketball.
There was a time when Meryl Streep had never read, read a single line. And then she tried out for her school play or, you know, Janis Joplin had never, you know, strummed the guitar, but then said, I'm a musician.
Or Stephen King. There was a time when Stephen King had never written a book.
Now he's Stephen King. He's written 64 books and all New York Times bestsellers, et cetera.
But there was a time where he was not an author. But at some point, he had to claim that as part of his identity.
I am a rower. I am a writer.
I am a basketball player. I am an actress.
And it's really powerful to be able to claim that identity. And it doesn't require being a master of your craft to do that.
Like you've never run before, but you want to be a runner. Like go jog around your block one time.
You're a runner. You are a runner.
Like, yeah, you're not a Olympic gold medalist marathon runner, but you're a runner. Like you're getting into it.
You're trying. And so the ability really is about growth mindset.
You know, Carol Dweck, the woman who really originated that concept, you know, this idea that we can be and become anything that we set our minds to through diligence and hard work of saying, I might not be this right now. but a fixed mindset says I might not be this right now and I will never be this ever.
But a growth mindset,

the same mindset that I applied to this rowing project with the most dangerous ocean in the world is like, I am not a rower yet, but I can reach into my resources, people in my know my network, et cetera, and learn some skills. And the story in the book starts out with me quite literally falling flat on my face.
The first stroke I try to take in this tiny little really unstable rowboat and falling into a Lammett River in Portland, Oregon, near where I was living where I grew up. But it didn't stop me.
I got back in the rowboat, got back in again, and ultimately completed that crossing of Drake Passage, becoming the first person in history to row the most dangerous ocean crossing in the world. But had I stopped with that limiting belief, or have you listening, stopped with the limiting belief, I'm not this, I'm not that.
Well, you never will become that. But being able to claim that in identity, I am this, a possible mindset says the possibilities are limitless.
I love the opening of the book when you tell the story, I'm a super visual person, so I'm thinking of it right now, of walking into that really intimidating, gorgeous New York, really incredible event that you were going to with all billionaires and you show up in a t-shirt. And what struck me from that evening was the conversation that you had with that older gentleman at the end, because it really hit so close to my heart and I was hoping you could share it with everybody.
Yeah. So, you know, I do a lot of public speaking and in this sense, I was invited to give a speech for a Wall Street group and I was giving the speech the following day, but the day before they kind of invited me to a small intimate gathering with like eight or so folks.
You said all, you know, billionaire hedge fund manager, investor, you know, big hotshot guys in Wall Street, older gentlemen, kind of average age was mid-60s, maybe early 70s. And it was a very interesting night.
I certainly maybe was a little bit of fish out of water, as you mentioned, walking up in a t-shirt and jeans and low-top Jordan sneakers. But they made me feel welcome.
And we had a really interesting conversation just around hopes and dreams and aspirations and goals. But they really wanted to hear about my expeditions.
Oh, what was crossing Antarctica like? What was it like being on Everest? Did you see dead bodies? And every single time I tried to kind of pivot questions back to them about sort of their life philosophies or really their goals, aspirations, or more deeper vulnerable questions around that, it sort of kind of pivoted off of that. And so at the end of the night, as I was getting ready to leave, an older gentleman, I guess his age around 75, kind of pulls me aside.
We had this short but very memorable conversation that really stuck with me where I love to ask people from school kids all the way up to CEOs, what's your Everest? For me, that's a metaphor for my childhood dream. I always wanted to climb Everest and I've been fortunate to summit that mountain twice, but I recognize that most people don't necessarily want to go climb mountains or walk across the

continent, but we all have huge, you know, goals, I think in our life. And I'd asked that question

and no one gave me a response. And he pulls me aside and he says, you know, Colin, I'm sorry,

myself and none of my friends answered your question. It's a super important question.

And he says, I feel like I want to share this with you, which is when you ask that question to me,

I keep thinking about this moment I had in summer camp when I was 14 years old and I was sitting quiet alone on this peaceful mountain lake. And he goes, you know, I have made more money than you can possibly imagine in my life, but there's not a day in my mind that I don't go back to that mountain lake as a 14 year old kid and wonder what would have happened had I actually allowed myself to ask this question.
He says, I got so caught up in the rat race and what was expected of me. And by everyone else's measure, I've been quote unquote successful.
But there was something in it, the way he told me this story that he was like, he felt like he had kind of missed out on something that life had to offer without having asked him this question. So it's an interesting moment.
I chose to open the book with that. Just as I think we all have an idea of what success looks like externally.
We look at somebody on television or on our social media feeds or in any sort of context and say, oh, he or she has it figured out. And this guy would be like the most obvious sort of archetype of a person.
We're like, well, that guy did it. He crushed life.
He made so much money. It had this impact and whatever.
And even for him to share with me like, hey, I'm not sure I actually summited my Everest. I summited a bunch of other mountains, but it wasn't my personal Everest.
And so I opened the book asking people, what is your Everest? You might be down pretty far down a path. You might be wondering what your purpose is, what you're driving towards.
And it is vulnerable to actually ask yourself that question. And then of course, this book doesn't just ask you that question, but allows you to answer it and gives you an action towards actually how to move towards it, how to actually reach that summit.
But I think it's important. I think it's super important to be vulnerable with ourselves and actually say, what is my Everest? Even if that's not what other people around you think you should do.
And this book really starts to break down the limiting beliefs that pop up for us. Well, my Everest is this, but then you start

going, oh, but I don't have enough money. I don't have enough time.
But what if people criticize me?

What if I fail? These limiting beliefs and the book really goes through the lens of really

exciting adventure stories, but through how we all have these limiting beliefs, myself included,

but how I figured out how to overcome many of them and thrive and how you can as well

i decided to change that dynamic

i couldn't be more excited for what you're gonna hear start learning and growing inevitably

something will happen no one succeeds alone you don't stop and look around once in a while

you could miss it i'm on this journey with me