You Don’t Need A Mentor. Focus On THIS Instead

Shaan Puri

The thing that I don't think anybody really talks about is kind of touchy-feely, but every single successful person I know has a story like this. Alright, Sam, I want to do a short episode that is about one specific topic: believers. A lot of founders I know are interested in getting investors and advisors. I'm sure you get hit up a lot in your email for either, "Hey, will you invest in this?" or "Will you advise in this?" I think everybody needs somebody in their career, usually in their early twenties, that believes in them more than they believe in themselves at the time. They just have an irrational belief. You're a penny stock, but they see you as a blue chip, and they want to buy up all your stock. They do that by spending time with you, by spending effort with you, sometimes investing in you, sometimes advising you. But it's not the advice; it's not the money that actually matters. In hindsight, what really mattered was that this person believed in you more than you believed in yourself at the time. They almost trick you into believing in yourself or just going forward and overcoming that initial hesitation or doubts to just get going. Eventually, your evidence will start to catch up, and you're fueled by your evidence and your own self-belief. It's like jump-starting a car. There are people in your life who do that. I've never talked to you about this, but I know a couple of people in my life that did this. I want to hear, did you have this?

Sam Parr

I had this experience with a couple of people. First of all, my wife. I felt like she was doing the same thing when I met her; she was picking stocks. She picked a good one, I hope. The first person was Scott Belsky. Scott Belsky is currently the Chief Product Officer of Adobe and soon to be CEO, I think. He's probably a billionaire because he has started and sold a bunch of companies. I cold emailed him when I first started my company, The Hustle, asking him to invest, and he said no. Then, about 6 or 8 weeks later, he was on our daily email, and I got an email from him in particular when I was having a horrible day. He said, "These emails are just so good, I have to join," and he gave me like $15,000 or something like that. I only met with Scott in person one time because Scott has always been a big deal back then; he's an even bigger deal now. He had one meeting with me where he taught me. I had never heard the word "steward." You know, steward, like you are a steward of this capital, you are a steward of the brand. He gave me this pump-up talk, and he said, "I could tell you were going to be a steward of The Hustle and a steward of my money and anyone else's money—your customers. You have this." I remember thinking it changed my life. The fact that Scott fucking Belsky believed in me and he used this word "steward," I was so into it. The second person was Tim Ferriss. I have told this story before, but basically, I met Tim Ferriss because he lived near me in San Francisco, and we would walk our dogs at the same time and just talk about neighborhood stuff. Well, a few weeks after we first started talking, I got an email from Tim saying, "Hey, I know what The Hustle is; it looks really cool. Could we meet and get dinner? I can ask you a little bit about email because I want to start a newsletter."

Shaan Puri

And I was like, "Yeah, sure."

Sam Parr

Let's do it, man! So, we go out to dinner in our neighborhood. I sit down, and he goes, "Oh, you are the dog owner's guy! You are the same guy!" I was like, "Yeah, man, what's going on?" I never told him what I did for work when we would walk our dogs together because I wanted him to think I didn't want to bother him. He was like a celebrity to me, and I didn't want to ruin that relationship. It was awesome that this guy wanted to meet with me. He said, "What you guys are doing is so smart, so innovative." I was like, "It's not that interesting." But he insisted, "No, it is." He bought into me and believed in me. That was such a big deal to me that he gave me the time of day, even just at dinner. It was game-changing. I felt like, "I'm the man! I'm the best! There is no one better than me." I had that energy because of those two meetings.

Shaan Puri

And was it just like a temporary high that fades, you know, 30 minutes later? Or do you feel like that planted some kind of seed in you?

Sam Parr

It planted the seed because then I would look at Scott and Tim's other endeavors. You know, they did some amazing stuff, and it felt good. You know how when you go to a website and you see someone who puts your logo on their website to brag that they use you? You go to like HubSpot.com and see that Nike uses it. I felt so much gratitude that I was one of the logos on their websites. I remember thinking, "Look, this person picks a bunch of winners, and I happen to be part of this basket." I feel honored. I would use that for a long time, like going to his Crunchbase profile where he lists The Hustle as an investment. I remember thinking that I was so special, and I used that for fuel for a long time.

Shaan Puri

Dude, that's a great story! Have you done that for anyone else, do you think?

Sam Parr

Yeah, look, you and I have done it together on this podcast when we call people out. For example, Michael from Our Future. This kid was probably 20 years old when he cold emailed you and me to make videos for us. We loved his energy. I think that you and I both bought into him a little bit. We're like, "Your energy is so good." The same goes for Dylan and Henry. Yeah, well, I think you and I have done it together. Who bought in? Who bought yours?

Shaan Puri

So, I'll give you three quick examples. The first one is a woman named **Lisa Keester**. Lisa Keester is a professor at Duke, or she was at the time; I have no idea what she's doing now. It's a good reminder to look her up and drop her a note. I took a class my last year at Duke. I was a pre-med student and had taken the MCATs. I was ready to go to med school. In my last semester, I said I should take a class with my two best friends. It's crazy—we're friends through college, we lived together, and we'd never taken a class together. We decided, "Let's take the easiest class we can." I was so burned out from studying for the MCATs; I just wanted something that was the easiest class. So, we looked it up on RateMyProfessors.com, and it was like, "The easiest class is a class called *Getting Rich*."

Sam Parr

Sounds good, good title.

Shaan Puri

And she was just clickbaiting us. It was a personal finance and entrepreneurship class, but "getting rich" sounds a lot better. She was a woman with a crazy story. She graduated from Duke with a degree in Mandarin because that’s what she was interested in. She just followed her interests. She told us, "I remember at the time feeling completely clueless about what the hell I’m supposed to do with my life because all my friends were going to law school, banking, whatever. I didn’t want to do those, but it just felt like school was just a giant pipe. They just dumped you out in New York, LA, or San Francisco in one of these tracks, and I wasn’t on one of the tracks. I felt bad about myself." She realized that people were asking, "What the hell are you gonna do with this Mandarin degree? Good luck with that." She thought, "I bet I can figure something out in China." So, she just moved to China with a one-way ticket. She ended up building a great business there, connecting Chinese companies with American companies because she spoke both languages. Anyway, she got super rich in the process, retired by 30, and came back to teach. The reason she bet on me or believed in me early was that she was not an investor. She really wasn’t even an adviser; she was a believer. We had this terrible idea to start a sushi restaurant chain. We were like, "Why isn’t there a Chipotle for sushi?" We thought we could do it, even though we had no restaurant experience, no sushi experience, nothing. Everybody I talked to—every adult, every grown-up that I looked up to—was basically saying, "Restaurants equal fail. Doing a startup versus going to med school? I don’t know, man. Are you sure? You just got accepted; you should just go." She was the only one who said, "This sounds awesome! You could totally do this." At the time, I took that as her believing in our idea. I thought we had a good idea. I wish I could say that she believed in us, but she didn’t even really know us that well. She was actually just such a big believer that if you do the most interesting, exciting, and ambitious thing for you in your life at the moment, shit works out. She was a believer in the path more than even us. But at the time, I interpreted it as her thinking we were gonna win, that this was a good idea and that it was gonna work. So, even false belief will work; it’ll fuel your engine for a while.

Sam Parr

Not only false belief, but just her one conversation with you, which she does not remember. At the time, she was like, "Totally... what I'm saying is not important, this is no big deal." And conversations like that make such a big impact every once in a while, you know?

Shaan Puri

What I mean is, like when your kid draws something and then they show it to you, and it looks horrible, but you're like, "This is awesome! Oh my God, how did you think of this?" Or like, "Are those two colors? Is that because of this?" You make them feel like they're a freaking artist. She did that for me, except I was 18 years old, or maybe 21 or 22. She looked at my terrible business plan and said, "That's awesome! You could totally do this!" It fueled me. So, Lisa Keester was the first one. And it was genuine, by the way. There was no BS in it. I think she genuinely had that level of enthusiasm and excitement about it, and it was contagious. It cannot be faked when somebody's genuinely excited for you.

Sam Parr

Alright guys, really quick. Back when I was running The Hustle, we had this premium newsletter called **Trends**. The way it worked was we hired a ton of analysts and created this sort of playbook for researching different companies, ideas, and emerging trends to help you make money and build businesses. Well, HubSpot did something kind of cool. They took this playbook that we developed and gave to our analysts, and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download. It breaks down all the different methods that we use for spotting upcoming trends and identifying different companies that are going to explode and grow really quickly. It's pretty awesome that they took this internal document, which we use for teaching our analysts how to do this, and turned it into a tool that they are giving away for free. Anyone can download it! So, if you want to stay ahead of the game and find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea exist, this is the ultimate guide. If you want to check it out, you can see the link down below in the description. Now, back to the show.

Shaan Puri

The second person was this guy named John Prendergast. We got into some accelerator where you're supposed to be assigned a mentor, which is the most fake way to get a mentor. It gets assigned to you. This guy put in a request; he said, "I want these guys." It was because he himself, although now he was doing some fintech company, his first business was as a franchisee of Boston Market. He thought, "Oh, these guys are doing a restaurant thing; I can help them out." He helped us out in two ways. The first was he gave us real talk. He took us into his office and said, "So, what's the plan?" We told him the whole business pitch we had practiced a million times. Then he asked, "Is this shit gonna work or not?" Just him asking us that way jarred me, and I was like, "I have no idea," which is not what you're supposed to say when you're pitching to investors or employees or anybody, really. You're supposed to say, "Of course this is gonna work. Here's the research, here's the studies, here's why, here's the plan." But I was like, "Dude, I have no idea." He said, "So, you probably shouldn't sign a lease, you know, a personal guarantee on a 10-year lease, right, if you don't know if this concept's gonna work." He asked, "How can you figure out if the concept's gonna work?" He just asked a better question. Instead of asking where we should launch or what location we should go for, he asked, "How do you figure out if this is even worth doing? If people want this?" He got us thinking, and we eventually decided to do a cloud kitchen. The thing he did afterwards was much more valuable. After we talked for about an hour, the bad news was we were dumb. The good news is we knew we were dumb, whereas there are a lot of 21-year-olds who are dumb but think they're smart. We had the one asset: we thought we were pretty dumb. So when somebody told us a good idea or seemed smarter than us, we actually took them up on it. He told us to think about three things, so we immediately went and did those three things. Four days later, we reached out to John and said, "Hey, John, we did those three things. Here's what we learned, and here's what we're gonna do next." He was like, "These guys are great." Now that I'm in a position where I sometimes give people advice, that never happens. It seemed like the obvious thing to do, but it rarely ever happens. Rarely do people ask a question, genuinely want the answer, then take good advice, act on it, and come back to say, "Here's what happened." He wrote a blog post, and what he said in that post I don't believe was true at all at the time, but dude, that was like a gust of wind in our sails. He said, "I've met these founders, and I've met a lot of founders—probably a hundred founders—and I've given a lot of advice. These guys, they took what I said and acted on it immediately, violently." He said, "One of the most important things for an entrepreneur is a high bias for action, and these guys," he named us, "they have the highest bias for action of anyone I've met in the last ten years." I was like, "I didn't even know that phrase." It's kind of like you're talking about Stewart; I had never heard "bias for action." But I was like, "Fucking put that label on my back; that's me now." I was a blank canvas before that, an empty vessel. Him giving me that label became kind of like a calling card. I thought, "Yo, I don't know what the right action or the right answer is, but I know that how I do things is I have a high bias for action. I'm just gonna take a shit ton of action and figure things out that way." He gave us a real gift in that moment, which was again not really true, but it didn't matter. It was true in my mind, and therefore he gave me something to strive towards, which reminds me of your Belsky story.

Sam Parr

So check this out. John is an entrepreneur, I guess. I think he has a podcast too. I found, I don't know if you want people to see this, but I found an old Sean website that is basically your resume. On this website, it has references, and you've got one from John. I would bet on these guys in almost anything. They have the highest bias to action of any entrepreneurs I've met in the past few years. Then it links off to this blog post that he wrote about you, which is insane. In the blog post, he has a conversation that you guys had together, and it's pretty funny.

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, he is... that was the second one. The third one is Michael Birch. Michael Birch was the guy who was what I wanted to be. He was a Silicon Valley billionaire who built multiple successful companies and was living the life. He had a cool office in San Francisco, and I moved to San Francisco to work with him. I worked with him, and eventually, he ended up promoting me. He was the CEO at the time, and I was the junior guy in the company. I was 24 years old, probably the youngest guy in the company. He actually promoted me to CEO, which was insane. This was, you know, like an 18-person company at the time. It wasn't just that he promoted me; it was the speech he gave. He took me off-site, and I thought I was getting fired. That's what I had seen in movies: they take you out for coffee because they want to "shoot you in the head" out there and not cause a scene in the office. So, I texted my mom, saying, "Oh no, he wants to meet off-site. I'll be home for lunch. You know, it's over. I had a good run; it was fun, but whatever I was doing there, I was making it up as I went. I must have done something wrong." He sat me down with him and his wife, and he said, "You know, when you meet somebody, sometimes you just know." I thought he was talking about his wife. He continued, "I've met a lot of people in Silicon Valley. I know now when somebody's special and they're going to do something special in their career. You're either going to do it here or elsewhere, so I want to give you the keys to have you do it here." I was blown away. You know, it was like an astrology reading. It didn't mean anything; there was no evidence, no logic, no explanation, no rationale. But him just saying, "You're going to do something special," that fueled me. I then failed for like six years straight right after that, which felt horrible because this guy believed in me, and I just felt like I couldn't deliver this billion-dollar company that I was supposed to. But that fueled me for a very long time.

Sam Parr

Dude, this more than anything inspires me to give these speeches to other people.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I'm just gonna go *willy-nilly*, baby. Everybody's getting the fortune cookie from me from now on.

Sam Parr

Can I just tell you one of the funnier things that I've seen this week? So on Sean's... This looks like Sean is like a year out of college, or he's 24 years old. On your website, which I assume is your resume basically, you have your height and weight listed. So it says: > Sean Perry, 24 years old, 6 foot, 167 pounds of pure hustle

Shaan Puri

Yeah, did I? I didn't know that they liked...

Sam Parr

"Twisted steel and sex appeal." Like, you've just listed your height and weight on your resume and you said, "I live on stage, run on fumes, and I'm willing to take big risks." Oh my god, that is so funny!

Shaan Puri

When you're the greatest founder in the world, they don't call you the greatest founder; they call you Sean Corey. Right? Yeah. He said, "I didn't know how to make a resume. I didn't know what you're supposed to do." So I just thought from first principles, like, "What would I do?" It was like half NBA draft scouting report—my height, my weight, my waistband. I did it. You can see it on there. I did a thing that was like a skills bar, like in NBA 2K, where it's like, "This person is good at three-point shooting, bad at dunking." I remember I did this, and the guy in the interview was like, "So I looked at your resume, if we're going to call it that." He goes, "Hard work is only like halfway full. Why would you say that you don't work hard?" I was like, "Well, true, that's why."

Sam Parr

Dude, a lot of your stuff is accurate, by the way. If you just had 24... that's over 10 years ago. Negotiations was high, design medium, programming nothing, public speaking almost 100 out of 100. You had attributes, son! You knew exactly what I mean, you're on. Right, that's fine. This is such a funny website, this is so funny.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, organization under 50. Like, on a scale of 0 to 100, my organization's a 40. That's true, you know that. Where's my hard work? My work ethic? Okay, I gave myself like a 70, whereas, you know, improvisation I gave myself a 90. This is *fucking* accurate. At least I told more lies.

Sam Parr

This is so funny! And then you have like a collage of all the stuff where it says "Hot off the Press" and it's a collage of all the times that you've been mentioned in media. This is awesome! It's actually cool to see. I bet a lot of people who listen to this should go [check it out].

Shaan Puri

When I did my final interview with the billionaire, he scrolled down to the bottom. I had this little motivational poster-looking thing. I mean, it's all cringe now, dude. Like, let's do it.

Sam Parr

It's not cringe. It's not cringe.

Shaan Puri

This is all very cringe, but I'm like, it's a proud cringe. It's like when you look back and you're like, "Oh, I was a geeky in high school," but like, you know...

Sam Parr

This kid's going places. That's where.

Shaan Puri

That I felt like I was going places. I had one thing on here that got referenced. She was like, "You know why I like your resume? The very last line under things: 'Don't believe your own bullshit.' I like that." That resonated with the, you know, the billionaire. I was like, "Oh man, I was throwing shit at the wall." This whole thing was like a hundred possible things that might resonate.

Sam Parr

You're like, "I actually did believe my own bullshit and it worked." I threw all this stuff, and it got me here. That's awesome! I like looking at this website, by the way. Yeah, "Believers versus Advisers," I'm on board.

Shaan Puri

Be a believer for somebody. And if somebody believes in you, it's a good reminder today to hit them up and thank them for it. That's the takeaway here.

Sam Parr

That's it.