The $20K Mistake 99% of Retailers Make (Adapt or Die) | James Keyes DSH #1033

Think about what Amazon is.

It's a catalog company.

I mean, it goes full circle all the way back to where Sears was.

Wow.

They just found a better way to do it.

And then eventually there'll be a company that can make it even better, right?

Exactly.

Change equals opportunity.

Sears, had they stayed the course, could have been Amazon today.

All right, guys, Jim Keys here today.

Business legend.

Thanks for coming on.

Sean, it's great to to be here.

Yeah, you've been part of some of the biggest companies in the world.

Yeah, I've had a few adventures over the years.

Incredible, man.

How'd that all get started?

I did not take the normal path.

I was one of these kids.

Literally, I didn't know what business meant.

I thought business, when I was in high school, I literally thought business was like typing class.

And literally, we had no frame of reference in the small town I grew up in.

Where'd you go?

Grafton, Massachusetts.

Never heard of it.

So yeah.

Yeah,

Central Mass.

And you get west of Boston about 30, 40 miles.

It gets really rural really fast.

And so, yeah, I just had no frame of reference.

And

like so many kids,

I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, right?

I thought, I don't know, maybe if I work really hard, maybe I'd be a doctor or a lawyer.

I didn't know.

Ended up almost by mistake in business because I was planning to try to get to law school somehow, someway.

I thought, yeah, that's a career, man.

They make a lot of money and they wear suits and it looks sharp.

I would have made a terrible lawyer, terrible lawyer.

But yeah,

I found the business path.

And

here's the irony.

You're an entrepreneur.

The reason I was successful in business is I'm an entrepreneur.

You don't think of that.

You think of corporate entrepreneur as almost an oxymoron.

Right.

Right.

I mean,

there are very few people that see themselves as entrepreneurs in a corporate environment because a corporation will beat the entrepreneur out of most people.

Right.

It encourages conformity.

Right.

And it discourages stepping out and taking risks that entrepreneurs do.

The irony is all corporations need entrepreneurs.

And so my career really was propelled by my willingness to step out and take those risks and be an entrepreneur within a corporate environment.

And it paid off.

It does work.

I love that.

Yeah.

Well, they call them intrapreneurs now, right?

Yeah, that's a fancy name for them.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

It's definitely an interesting dynamic because as companies grow, they kind of lose that entrepreneurial flair that started the company.

They do.

And here's the irony.

I talk a lot about change.

And I see change as opportunity.

I've kind of coined the expression change equals opportunity, ironically, the acronym CEO, right?

I mean, think about that.

It is so powerful that every bit of commerce begins and ends with something changes.

Someone responds to that change and they get compensated for it, right?

Right.

So what happens?

Then they get big and they get afraid to keep changing and someone else says, well, I can do it better.

And they stimulate another change and then they get compensated for it.

And sometimes that company that started with the response then goes away.

Right.

And that's unnecessary if you can manage that response to change, proactive, confident response to change in a way that makes you virtually an entrepreneur.

Right.

And these days you got to change quicker than ever, right?

Constantly.

Because of technology and all these advancements.

If you're not embracing AI now, you're kind of falling behind.

Exactly.

I've got a great example.

I haven't really used.

I didn't put it in the book, but think about when I grew up, we had something called a Sears catalog.

You're too young to remember Sears catalogs.

I heard of Sears.

Yeah.

Well, they Sears started as a catalog.

Okay.

Right.

So when I was a kid, they didn't have Sears stores all over the place.

In fact, in my little rural area, we had a catalog.

So I'd flip through and look at,

they had these like

Halloween costumes, and I wanted to be a Marine, you know, a Marine costume in there.

And you'd look at all these cool things in the catalog, and you'd buy something.

It would show up at your door.

You would call them and buy it?

Yeah.

It was like an 800 number that you'd call and you'd order something

and then they would deliver it in a week or something like that.

Well, then Sears decided as they got bigger, we need stores to satisfy that demand.

And then along comes Walmart and changes everything, right?

They started doing

more aggressive pricing and bigger and bigger stores.

And pretty soon Sears went by the wayside and, well, they're still around barely, but then what happened?

Amazon comes in and says, well, we can do it better.

We can go online.

But think about what Amazon is.

It's a catalog company.

I mean, it goes full circle all the way back to where Sears was.

Wow.

They just found a better way to do it.

They just made it better.

They just made it better.

Yeah.

And then eventually there'll be a company that can make it even better, right?

Exactly.

And that's what change is all about.

Change equals opportunity.

Sears, had they stayed the course could have been amazon today

but when you get big that inertia sets in resistance to change creeps into every organization and instead of being the amazon of today which is ironically where they started they've pretty much gone away yeah there's been a few big companies that that's happened to right radio shock yeah um i think red lobster is bankrupt right now yeah there's there's been quite a few recently blockbuster Blockbuster.

I wasn't going to bring it up until you did.

No, I mean, I had to.

I mean, here's the irony.

I'm out there talking about change, and I get, you know, of course, you'll post one of these, and somebody will be out there going, oh, yeah,

this is a guy that turned down Netflix for $50 million.

And what they don't think through is the real story because there's so much more to learn in the blockbuster story about change.

Yeah, I want to hear your side of that.

So you got presented that deal to buy Netflix.

What's going on in your head?

No, I didn't, ironically.

Here's where people get their information.

We're living in a world of perceptions.

I'm going to talk more about perception in a while, but we're living in a world of perceptions where you flip on the internet and

you're scrolling through things and you see something and you just react to it and then you take it as fact.

So on the internet, there is this perception that the CEO of

Blockbuster turned down Netflix offer to...

to sell for $50 million.

Here's the reality.

That happened in the year 2000.

In the year 2000, Netflix stock was trading for 79 cents.

So, what I like to tell people is: if you think that was a dumb move to turn them down for 50 million, why didn't you buy the stock at 79 cents a share?

Right?

So, it was very public at the time.

It was public.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, but they were doing DVDs by mail and struggling.

And so, Blockbuster looked at that deal.

This is seven years before I got to the company.

This is the year 2000.

And they said, we can do the same thing ourselves.

And they did.

So they had built a DVD by mail business, just as Netflix did.

And Blockbuster's plan was to stream.

It's just that in 2007, people forget that streaming was a very, very ineffective.

vehicle at the time because of buffering, the lack of Wi-Fi, the lack of bandwidth

that created not a great user experience at the time.

Right.

So the quality wasn't there.

Quality wasn't there.

Now, we did buy a a streaming company.

We bought a company called Blockbuster

called Movie Link that we renamed Blockbuster on Demand.

So again, people don't know the story, but Blockbuster was very well prepared for streaming in 2007 when I arrived with the acquisition of this company that was really built by the studios to prevent the fragmentation that's occurred as a result today.

Interesting.

So you were prepared for the streaming era.

So then what exactly happened?

Absolutely.

Well, again, change happened.

So here we were.

We had significantly increased earnings for the company, made some improvement in store operations, bought a streaming video company.

We had something called Total Access.

You get DVDs by mail, online,

in stores, kiosks even to compete with Redbox.

And then all of a sudden in 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed.

The financial markets completely shut down.

The banking system was basically in disarray worldwide.

This wasn't just the United States.

It's a worldwide financial crisis.

And Blockbuster had a billion dollars of debt that had to be refinanced in 2009.

That's the real story of Blockbuster.

It was very difficult to get that debt refinanced.

We ultimately did restructured the company and sold the company to Dish Networks.

Oh, got it.

Yeah.

Oh, gosh.

You never hear that part of the story.

Yeah, I know.

No, people just take, again, perception.

I'll just take, I'll take the, I'll take the nickel version of the story and then I'll accept it as real.

Yeah.

But there's so much more to learn.

Right.

If, if someone digs in and gets the truth.

That's interesting because you hear that with Google and Yahoo, too.

You're like, oh, they could have bought, Yahoo could have bought Google or something, right?

Exactly.

Exactly.

But they don't know anything.

No one's ever heard Yahoo's side of it.

Right, exactly.

Yeah, that's interesting.

So many stories.

When was that shift from physical stores to streaming?

Was it a specific year you remember?

It didn't really, it wasn't really viable.

It began in the year 2008, 2009.

We had Roku came out with a device.

TVs weren't smart.

There weren't apps.

And to sort of time stamp this, the iPad,

which is now the first time we had a device that was viable to watch movies on, that was launched in 09.

So by 2010, 2011, we were just then beginning to see viable streaming capability.

Prior to that, there was a little streaming going on in 07, 08, but it was primarily kids on an Xbox.

Got it.

That makes sense.

So Redbox must be struggling now, right?

Yeah, Redbox is struggling.

But Redbox, it was an interesting business model.

They had a very low-cost device.

They created these little kiosks for probably $10,000 each and put them in front of Walmart stores and 7-Eleven stores.

Wegmans, too.

Yeah, yeah.

And ironically, the studios did not support that model.

So the studios wouldn't sell them DVDs.

You know how they got their inventory?

How?

They would literally go to Walmart.

No.

Yeah.

And buy, they had a whole army of young people.

Basically, they'd send into Walmart and buy five copies of a movie.

They're paying full retail price?

Yeah.

Well, but here's the deal.

Walmart was using DVDs as a lost leader.

Oh.

So to attract customers.

Interesting.

And they didn't realize that Redbox had made a whole, built a whole distribution model around going into Walmart stores, buying them.

Their cost of goods, believe it or not, was lower than mine at Blockbuster.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cause they were buying the

discounted DVDs at Walmart.

That's crazy.

I know.

I know.

What a strategy.

I know.

Does a lost leading strategy still work, you think, these days?

Yeah, I am not a big fan of lost leaders at retail.

I know a lot of retailers use them, but

I think it always comes down, you know, prior to Blockbuster, I was CEO of 7-Eleven, and I'm just a big believer.

It's all about about the product.

You are what you sell.

I agree because I feel like customer loyalty isn't as strong as it used to be.

Because people are now just shopping prices, if we're being honest.

They're shopping price.

Price will always be a factor.

Price has been a factor since retail was invented.

But ultimately, it comes down to the product.

You're going to buy.

I mean, look at Starbucks.

I remember when Starbucks came in.

7-Eleven at the time, we were the biggest retailer of coffee in the world.

And Starbucks came in and, you know, I'm guilty.

I looked at him and said, who's going to spend four bucks for a cup of coffee, right?

But the quality of their product and the experience was so good that price didn't matter to that customer.

They were willing to pay for the quality of the experience and the quality of the product.

It's a great lesson in that.

Interesting.

Yeah, you're right.

That's a great example, actually.

Yeah, because some people do have that loyalty if they like the experience and the overall.

It's not just the price, right?

Exactly.

If you go to 7-Eleven in Japan they are selling restaurant quality sushi and people will use 7-Eleven in Japan not just Japan but Taiwan Thailand Korea they'll use 7-Eleven three meals a day

because the quality of the food is so good that it keeps them coming back 7-Eleven in in Asia doesn't have to discount

They don't play that game.

They don't have to play that game.

It's a good value, but it's really about the quality of the product.

Yeah, I used to go to 7

all the time.

Probably when you were CEO, actually.

Because I went when I was a kid.

Yeah.

Boston cream donut.

Awesome.

Oh, man.

Those are good.

Yeah, that was an innovation.

Believe it or not, putting those donuts in the store was a big deal.

We had to build a whole nationwide infrastructure with bakeries that were in every market, partnering with bakers.

and the ability to distribute that product at least once a day because you can't have a donut sit on the shelf for 48 hours and it's just not good anymore.

So we had built, basically, had the advantage of being able to replicate the thing that made 7-Eleven in Japan and in Asia so successful, which is daily delivery of fresh products.

Yeah, because the stores are small.

So how do you decide what gets in,

what gets out?

Ah, this is the secret sauce for 7-Eleven.

They were able to harness technology in a way that let them change the product assortment literally by store

by figuring out, because convenience is literally neighborhood by neighborhoods.

Sometimes a store on one side of the street has different needs, different customer needs than a store on the other side.

You might have one on the drive side that people are stopping for coffee on the way in, and then on the way home, maybe they don't drink as much coffee and the coffee sales would be lower.

So the idea is to use technology to know every item in the store, store, every SKU, which is the stockkeeping unit, and be able to manage that inventory appropriately.

So you're never ever out of stock on the best-selling products.

And on the slow-moving items, since the store is so small,

the challenge is to eliminate those items and replace them constantly with things that have a better chance of success.

Wow.

So you were using that tech in the early 2000s?

Yeah.

Yeah, we were one of the first to adopt it.

Whoa.

It was fabulous.

And it really

made the difference.

7-Eleven in Japan first launched this tech and they, it totally transformed their business.

I bet.

Because before his manuals

guess what would sell.

Exactly.

And 7-Eleven in the United States, when I first got there, we had

a history of negative same-store sales declining every year because we were building a lot of stores and perhaps cannibalizing some stores.

But the real problem wasn't the number of stores.

The real problem at the time was we really didn't know what sold, more importantly, what didn't sell in every store.

Yeah, they're everywhere.

7-Elevens.

Oh, yeah.

Almost 80,000 stores now.

Holy.

Yeah.

And the ones at gas stations, I assume, do the best?

In a window of time, yes.

Think of gasoline as another convenience item.

And the nice thing about 7-Eleven is it will continue to morph.

and sell those things that you need conveniently.

So literally, the company started selling ice for people's ice box.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And they transformed over time by keeping up with change.

Right.

So every time something changes, I mean, take ATMs.

We had

during my tenure there, ATMs used to be only at banks.

And then they started putting them randomly at a few locations.

Well, we decided it's a convenience item for people to get access to their cash.

So we put, we made the hard call, put them in every 7-Eleven store.

And that was probably expensive at the time.

It was very expensive because some stores didn't generate enough revenue to be able to make the ATM, the cost of the machine work.

But by making that decision, then people began to realize any 7-Eleven, I know I can get cash.

And then it became a huge revenue generator for the company.

Smart.

Wow.

Yeah.

And vapes became big, and I'm sure they started selling vaporizers and caught that trend.

Yeah, exactly.

Vapes, tobacco was declining, but then as tobacco declined, vaping started to grow.

Yeah.

Again, came in, provided the convenience.

And that

one thing that is consistent, the need for convenience will never go away.

Absolutely.

Right?

When did all keep up with change?

You're going to win.

Absolutely.

When did Slurpee Day launch?

Because that's one of the most viral marketing campaigns of all time.

I know.

You'll love this story.

So here's how the Slurpee Day started.

We played with the idea.

Let's give a free Slurpee on 7-Eleven Day.

In fact, I think the first time we did it may have been in 2002, which was the company's 75th anniversary.

We had a big splashy thing at New York City.

We rang the bell on Wall Street and had a big event at Radio City Music Hall in Ellis Island.

All this to celebrate the company's birthday, and we provided free Slurpees.

Well, we hadn't really thought it through.

And franchisees were a little upset because it was so popular.

that people came in and we didn't provide a little cup.

It was just

take a Slurpee and people were loading up these 16 ounce slurpees and walking out.

And so we stopped doing it for a couple of years.

And then around 2005, it was right around the time we sold the company.

We ended up selling 7-Eleven to the Japanese licensee.

David Letterman

had a little red ass.

Oh, yeah.

Well, here's what happened.

Our race team was Michael Andretti and the Andretti racing team.

And we had a car at Indy.

The Andretti team then hired Dana Kapatrick.

Oh, nice.

Away from Ray Hall Letterman racing.

Ooh.

Right.

And that happens all the time.

I mean, drivers get hired back and forth.

It's like football players changing teams.

Well, unfortunately, when a guy's named David Letterman and he's got a show,

the next week he puts an actor on stage.

I'm at home watching TV and this guy comes out and is Jim Keyes, CEO 7-Eleven.

I'm going,

what's up with that?

And the guy comes on stage and says, Dave, congratulations.

Thanks for helping us feature 7-Eleven's free Slurpees.

Anybody that goes into a 7-Eleven gets a free Slurpee.

Whoa.

Well, of course, this caused chaos.

The company wasn't prepared for it.

People all came into the store.

And literally, that triggered the realization that this is so popular.

Why don't we just do this?

So what started as a joke on 7-Eleven Day with David Letterman being upset at us for stealing his race car driver ended up being a good thing.

And

the company ended up putting small cups in.

Wow.

So you turned a negative into a positive.

Turned a negative into a positive.

What did he say afterwards?

Well, it was funny because

he did this twice with 7-Eleven.

First, he did it with

free Slurpees.

A few weeks later, he came back with free hot dogs.

Well, now the lawyers, of course,

those are a little more expensive than slippies.

Exactly.

But ironically, I had already left the company by now.

Oh, okay.

But he still used this guy, Jim Keys, CEO.

And every time a company, Carnival Cruise Line's toilets were overflowing, it's Jim Keys, CEO of Carnival Cruise.

Became a bit.

Oh, yeah, it became a bit free.

He had it going for like 10 years.

Damn.

It was his stir.

He was petty with you.

He was petty.

He was really mad you took Danica.

Shout out to Danica.

She's been on the show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, she's awesome.

Danica is great.

Yeah, she's great.

Yeah, hot dogs.

Shout out to Costco because they kept the same price for 22 years.

Pretty amazing.

$1.50.

They're obviously losing money on that at this point.

That's a classic loss leader, but

Costco looks at as a service because people love the hot dogs and they love to come in.

Let's face it, they're going to buy a lot while they're there.

Oh, yeah.

Well, just their food court in general, all the prices are super reasonable.

You're not spending that much, and it's a pretty good meal.

Yeah.

I'm a big Costco customer.

I love Costco.

I get teased because half my wardrobe comes from, they have great value.

They got good clothes.

I buy my Levi's there.

I buy my socks, my underwear, sometimes some apparel and interesting business model, right?

That's too much information.

I don't know.

You just told the whole world that you buy your underwear at Costco.

It's not going to be good for.

Yeah, yeah.

Nah, but interesting model because they don't make high margins.

No, I know.

I know.

Membership model.

That membership model works, and Costco did a really, really good job.

I mean, think about competing with Sam's and Walmart.

They've done quite well.

Yeah.

I wonder how Walmart's doing these days.

Walmart, I think, is doing well.

I've done a lot of business with Walmart over the years.

I have a huge respect for Sam Walton, when he came in, what he started, the culture he built, and they have a fabulous corporate culture there.

But they suffer from being big.

When you're as big as Walmart,

you have a giant target on your back.

And it's tough because people are going to challenge virtually everything you do.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I know the theft was a big deal, right?

With Walmart and Target.

Yeah.

A little bit of a challenge.

But, you know, Sean, a lot of that stuff, retailers, I've been through these cycles throughout my career and cycles come and go.

And we went through a really tough time during the pandemic, and crime went through the roof.

And retailers suffer the brunt of that challenge because people are desperate in a way.

Yeah.

And they will do some pretty stupid things.

But, you know, at the end of the day,

these things will pass and a good retailer will find you don't have to lock up the whole store.

You build trust with your customers.

And ironically, I used to have some of the stores in the toughest parts of town with the lowest amount of shrink.

Really?

Yeah.

Because what the trick was, if you keep that store well, you hire great staff, the neighbors know them, the store is clean, that store becomes almost a sacred treasure of the neighborhood.

They don't want to mess it up.

Right.

So they'll defend their own store and protect their own store from others who might come in and want to want to do damage.

100%.

Yeah.

I'm big on energy and big on environment.

Yeah, it really does work.

And again, when you're a big company, sometimes you don't see that.

You lose that

people touch and the importance.

But I don't care how tough the neighborhood is.

You can make it work with the right people and the right products and the right store environment.

Yeah.

So obviously self-checkout was pretty revolutionary.

Do you see AI being part of retail moving forward?

Yeah, AI, I think, is going to do a lot for retail.

I think there's some vulnerability, though.

A lot of people, when new tech comes, they...

want so badly to embrace it that they'll try things that I call tech for the sake of tech.

Yeah.

Too fast.

Exactly.

Well, or they, or it's gee whiz stuff that maybe looks good, but doesn't really move the needle on the business.

I do think tech will help us significantly and be able to manage inventories.

We were at 7-Eleven very early in the idea of using technology to empower the store manager, store operator, to make much better decisions about things like product inventories and in-stock capability.

AI will be able to do a lot of that thinking for them, but never replace the person.

Here's the difference.

The computer, the AI, that's the best systems in the world will know what's selling and what's not selling.

But that store operator who's there talking to the customers, they're the only ones that really know, you know what, there's construction that's going to start in two weeks on this street.

It'll really be hard by the time AI realizes that construction has happened and is having an impact on the sales.

By then it's too late.

The operator with the eyes and ears and the pulse on the community, empowered with AI, can do a far better job than just the computer alone.

So I don't really worry about the future of AI taking away all these jobs.

I think AI is going to supplement jobs and really help people do a better job.

But it's hard for us to eliminate the importance of that person.

And, you know, it's the story I said a minute ago.

Yeah.

The neighborhood, that store is part of the neighborhood.

And that person in there has a relationship with those customers.

It's a very

valuable element of retailing that's easy to overlook.

Yeah, so you still value that human connection with your businesses.

Exactly.

How has your leadership style changed over the years?

I've got a different point of view on leadership.

I don't think there is one leadership style.

There's a lot of people that teach servant leadership of this kind or XYZ leadership.

I believe leadership is

all about change and all about learning to adapt because the reality is, as I said, change equals opportunity.

Things are going to change.

People are going to change.

Systems are going to change.

Customers are going to change.

The leader must be able to adapt to those changes in order to effectively lead.

Unfortunately, too many leaders get stuck in a model.

that may have worked in a robust economy and all of a sudden the markets collapse, they have to pivot.

Right.

And they're just unable to do it because they're used to one leadership style, one management style.

Yeah, because a typical one I see in big companies is like a fear-based style, right?

Yeah.

Like the employees fear the boss or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's just not just in companies, by the way.

That's pervasive in society today, if you think about it.

That's everywhere.

But that's not an optimal working environment, in my opinion, right?

It's not an optimal working environment.

It's not an optimal societal environment right

and unfortunately the uh

the change in availability of technology with the internet and social media etc etc has i i think accelerated this propensity of fear

i mean think about it you turn on any news channel or Just flip through social media.

It's a fire hose of they're coming to get you.

Look what they're going to do to you.

They can do this.

They can do that.

And the irony is fear is

our worst enemy as individuals and as a society.

What are we afraid of?

With knowledge,

we can accomplish anything.

In fact,

I quoted Yoda in the book.

I love it.

Yeah.

Well, it's better to quote Yoda

than to quote ancient philosophers because people don't care what ancient philosophers say.

They care what Yoda says.

But he was talking to Luke about the importance of,

well, about the force and about

fear leading to the dark side.

He said fear leads to the dark side because

ignorance leads to fear and fear leads to anger and anger leads to violence.

And that negative cycle, We're there in so many parts of society, so many parts of the world, in this cycle of fear and anger that is fixable.

His advice to Luke was use the force, which to me is kind of a metaphor for faith.

I don't care which faith, but a faith in something, a belief in the universe or in God.

He encouraged Luke to use the force and knowledge.

And those two things

were the antidote to that negative cycle because he could turn understanding

and knowledge into hope and into peace.

I love that.

Yeah, isn't that cool?

That's so cool.

I mean, I was in Star Wars.

It was right there.

If you think about the messaging behind that, that we're in control of our own destiny.

And if we have a belief in ourselves and we learn how to learn, we can overcome virtually anything and we have nothing to fear.

Yep.

That's such great advice because knowledge knowledge is pretty accessible these days.

You could go to your local library, you could go to YouTube, and you could use that to escape your negative environment.

That's exactly right.

That's really the message that I've been out talking about: that

today, technology, the advantage of technology is, you know, I have right here in my pocket a portal to unlimited learning.

Right.

So, if I choose to be led around by a bunch of perceptions,

I'm vulnerable to that.

And it may make me angry.

It may make me want to fight.

Alternatively, I can use that portal to unlimited learning and I can find truth.

Maybe hard sometimes.

You may have to really work at it, but the truth is there.

And if we have the personal discipline to seek the truth, then we can replace our own anger and our own propensity for, you know,

aggression or reaction.

We can

change that with what I like to call relentless positivity.

I'm a positive guy.

Why?

Because I don't have any fear and I know that I can learn anything to overcome any challenge that somebody might throw at me.

Love it.

Yeah, that's a great mindset to have because a lot of people do deal with anger, but you could channel that in the right way.

You can channel it in the right way.

Yeah.

And think about it, as an entrepreneur, it can kill your career as an entrepreneur.

You can't allow that fear to creep in.

You can't allow that anger to creep in.

It's that relentless positivity that will make you successful as an entrepreneur.

And, you know, outside of the business world,

it's just a good way to live.

Absolutely.

Did you ever have any struggles with ego?

Cause you had all this success.

I, you know,

I like to think that I know where I came from.

So for me,

everything was upside, and I know I could go back if I had to.

So I think that helps keep me humble.

But I have struggled.

I've had people say, hey, dude, you think you know everything?

You're so arrogant, right?

I mean, because confidence

can be perceived as arrogance.

Yeah, there's a fine line, right?

Really fine line.

But here's what I learned.

And in researching for the book, I found

Norman Vincent Peale, right?

He was an old-time preacher, wrote

the power of positive thinking.

He was a big influencer of the day right uh and he was big on confidence but he preached in equal amounts the importance of humility

because confidence and humility have to go hand in hand to avoid arrogance but his definition of humility was really interesting because it wasn't it wasn't humility in the sense that oh gee i'm not so smart you know blah blah blah not self-effacing and which is fine to be self-effacing but he said, true humility is when you're smart enough to know that

you don't know everything and that every other human being walking on this planet has something that you can learn.

And if you just always try to learn from them, then you're going to stay this side of that line of arrogance because they'll know that you don't know everything.

Wow.

Isn't that cool?

It's very cool.

Yes, you got to get different perspectives, right?

You got to get different perspectives.

And you may not agree.

You don't have to agree.

But to be able to entertain another thought

is really important.

And what comes to mind when you're talking about this is politicians, right?

Sometimes they lose touch with reality because they're so in their bubble.

They're not getting different perspectives.

Exactly.

And we're caught up in a time when

there is a perceived strength around sticking to your position, even if it's wrong.

I call it in the book, I called it militant ignorance, right?

Where somebody knows something's wrong, but well, that was my position.

I don't want to be thought of as a wrong person.

I used to do that.

It was a terrible habit.

Yeah, no, everybody does it.

We're all in the world.

But

that's where confidence comes in.

If you have the strength of conviction yourself, as a politician or as a business person or just a guy on the street.

Absolutely.

If you have that strength of

conviction, then it's okay to be able to say, you know what?

I said X, Y, Z yesterday.

Today I have more information.

And now I'm going to say something different.

But that's because I'm armed with knowledge, more information.

Yeah.

I love when people open up like that, too.

It's a good sign for me.

It is.

In business and friendship.

Exactly.

James Williams.

Yeah.

Where can people find the book and keep up with you, man?

I'm out there,

jameswkeys.com.

I've got a website.

They can order it.

It's available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all the online sites.

And I've got

Jay Keys author is my social media handle on TikTok and Instagram and others.

And yeah, I hope people will help me spread the word because

I think there's a message here that can help all of us, whether you're in school and you want to do a better job academically, whether you're an entrepreneur, you want to use learning to succeed and build confidence.

I think there's a good message here.

Absolutely.

My objective is to share it.

Yeah, we'll link everything below.

Thanks for coming on today.

Thank you, Sean.

Yep.

Appreciate the opportunity.

For sure.

Thanks for watching, guys.

Check out the book, check out a site.

See you guys next time.