When you're down and out, it's not an easy thing.

First time I was homeless, I was 23 years old.

Second time when I was in my thirties and started thinking how bad things are.

No, my God, things are bad.

How doe I exist in this bad situation I looked at, How do I get out of it?

But I would go around collecting old sort of pop bottles, take him in two cents for a little 15 cents for a big one, get some money, and look for part time jobs.

No matter what they paid.

I wanted to get out of it.

I didn't want to be okay.

I'm gonna have to stay this way for a while.

How do I survive?

I look at how I got out of it.

And by gosh, you can get out of it.

You just have to do something.

You love what you do.

You want to be the best at it.

You know you don't You don't make music to be second best.

You make music to be the best or whatever.

You do whatever.

You don't have to be music.

Feel fear quite strongly.

There's times when something is important enough.

You've leaving it enough that you do.

You do it in spite of fear.

Running your own race demands trusting yourself, even when others don't.

I visualized this for myself.

When I was selling copiers door to door, I had a very clear vision of what my life was gonna be like.

And I encourage everyone to do it.

Uh, take a snap photo of what success looks like for you.

Are you?

How many employees do you have?

How much are you making?

Where do you live?

Are you sitting at a table with world leaders?

Are you standing on a stage in New York City giving a speech and hold on to that That snapshot and you will subconsciously start to make decisions that get you there.

Whatever it is that you want to dio, there's gonna be risking your life and risk is a necessary component of progress.

You could make any pioneering movements in the world of any kind whether they be the geographical, physical exploration that I've just been talking about.

Whether it be, you know, a more cerebral exploration of a scientific field takes three qualities essentially to do well and extremely well, actually, in this country it takes intelligence.

It takes energy and it takes integrity and integrity is absolutely an option.

You know, you may not be able to throw a football 60 yards.

You know, you may not be able to run the 109 8.

You know, you may not be able to sink three pointers from, but you can choose where you stand on the integrity scale.

Yeah, can't You weren't born wired one way or the other.

That is an absolute choice.

You make fear is the disease Hustle is the antidote.

Important thing about running your own race is dreaming big and dreaming Big to me meant knowing my history but not being bound by it.

It meant harnessing the past to drive me into the future.

Have been grounding myself and who I waas and where I came from so I could soar to become who I wanted to become.

I work hard, you're gonna need some luck.

But the harder you work, the lucky you get And if it doesn't work out, that's not the end of the world.

I just don't have anything in common with people that sit there and say, Oh my God, it was terrible.

So it's over.

It's water over the dam under the bridge.

Get on with it and start another business the next day or another career.

And be honest, look in the mirror and say, Why didn't it work out?

Well, it wasn't the skill set or wasn't.

I didn't have the temperament for it or I was in the wrong place.

Wrong time.

Uh, maybe I can afford to do it again.

Maybe I can't.

But people aren't honest with themselves.

They What I've always done is I've taken a yellow pad.

I draw a line down the middle, right out the pros on one side, the cons on another in a sense that if I let you see it, you wouldn't laugh at me.

And then when I get done, I just rip it up and throw it away.

Because I've worked out in my mind what is really and what isn't and what I can present to people.

And I can't what?

I can't write your goals down.

It makes all the difference.

Harvard did a study in 1973.

They took the graduating class and asked how many of them had goals.

100% of them had goals.

Well, they asked how many had written down their goals Upon graduation Onley 5% of the class had in 1993.

20 years Later, they followed up with the class.

They found that the 5% that had written down their goals 20 years prior upon graduating were worth more financially than the other 95% of the class put together.

So I have always written my goals down about what I wanted to achieve, and I really attribute a lot to that.

If you want to be successful, learn from the other people's mistakes.

Don't learn from the successful stories.

Successful stories they make.

Don't listen to that.

There are a lot of reasons behind it.

Learn from the mistakes, the other people.

No matter how smart you are, you will in count these mistakes.

You learn from mistakes, not because you will be able to avoid mistakes you were able to.

When these mistakes come, they suffer comes you know how to deal with it.

How to face it in my life is not how much we achieved.

It is how much we go through the tough days and mistakes.

And this is what if you step to think now would be good.

E think you have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold.

There's a friend of mine who says, like starting companies like staring into the abyss and eating glass.

And there's some truth to that were staring into the abyss.

Part is that you're gonna be constantly facing the, um, extermination of the company because most start ups fail ugly.

99% of Starkville.

So eso you you that that's the staring into the of this part.

You're constantly saying, Okay, if I don't get this right, the company will die.

Um, should be quite right, quite stressful.

And then, um, eating glass part is you've got to do.

You gotta do the problems you're gonna You're gonna work on the problem that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you wanna work on.

The key point there is you've got to enjoy what you do every day.

And for me, that's working with very smart people.

It's working on new problems.

You know every time we think, Hey, we've had a little bit of success were pretty careful not to dwell on it too much because the bar gets raised.

Do you get to a place where it's easy?

As an entrepreneur?

It's about to get really, really hard.

And so what you find is with really good entrepreneurs, they're constantly making things difficult for themselves.

Andi, it's pushing.

I'd like to say you push until it hurts or you sort of you wanna be always pushing beyond what you're comfortable with.

And, um, you're sweating just a little bit all the time.

And when that happens, when you're when you're constantly pushing beyond what you think what you know is possible, you're always sweating a little bit and you're always a little bit nervous.

But that is the drug of being an entrepreneur.

And so when you're pushing like that and you're never really relaxed, then it always feels small.

And so in many ways it feels to me the same now as it did at the beginning.

I think you should be doing something you're passionate about, so the question is always, you know, when I give my younger self advice.

You know, uh what?

I still go to Stanford.

Wrist will go to Stanford Law School.

Um, possibly But I think a lot more about why I was doing it.

I like to advance every year.

Thio advance myself, You know, spiritually, mentally, everything I like to advance myself have more fair going back than losing money.

You know, like I said when I was, I'm a lost money.

I've been broke up in red shops.

They've been blowing bread, you gotta have grit and grit means getting turned away from things 14, 15 times calling someone every two weeks, you know, every day for five months.

And then finally it materializing and something that you want and discover the joy and figuring things out means, you know, if if you know, fight through those problems, understand and learn how you address those problems and come up with the answers to those salute, come up with the answers to those problems within a solution that is uniquely yours.

That's an important part of growing up in solving problems.

Because if you can't solve easy problems now, you will not be able to solve difficult problems later.

If you want to project yourself to age 80 and then think back over your life.

And if you're if you're if you're 81 or you want to minimize the number of regrets you have throughout that period of time, I think this is something a lot of people do.

But it was a very clear way for me to think about making that kind of life decision on the and in the way it helped Waas.

I thought, Okay, if I go do this thing and participate in this thing called the Internet that I genuinely believe is gonna be a big deal.

And if I fail, um, I gonna regret having tried and failed, and I knew the answer that was no.

But I also knew that if I didn't try that, I would always regret that I would always wonder, and it would haunt me.

Do the best we can with what we have.

See, we want to live in the now and you see when you're down and out or having difficulties.

Your mind is working very fast.

Not you're being your mind is working very fast and it's working off a lot of now's from the past so a lot of experiences from the past and worries of what may happen in the future going through your mind.

Well, if you could eliminate that by saying Okay, there's nothing to do about the vast that's done.

Yesterday's newspapers can't change them.

And who knows for sure what could happen in the future?

Let's be here right now.

Take what resource is we have right now.

Act upon them and act towards a good future.

Goal.

The Onley thing that you can control that influences success in life is how hard you work, how honest you are and how well you deal with others.

You can control those variables, but let's variables.

You can't control how lucky you are.

Although the more you work, the lucky you get, you have no influence on the intellectual capabilities that God did or did not give you.

But you can work as hard as possible.

You can be scrupulously honest so that people respect you and you can get along with others because nobody does anything by themselves.