How To Go Beast Mode As A Founder

Shaan Puri

Alright, turn on the camera! I got a rant for you. I received a call yesterday from an entrepreneur who was going through something that is so relatable. They were stuck; they were at a plateau. Their business is not growing as fast as they want. They were pitching me on all the new things they were going to do, new features they were going to add, and then they started telling me about the side hustle they have going on. I had to stop them and tell them the truth. The truth is: stop searching for answers. We are all guilty of this. You know, if I'm overweight, all of a sudden I'm trying keto, I'm trying paleo, I'm reading books, I'm listening to podcasts, and I'm not just doing the obvious things. The trap that people fall into is thinking that the answer to their problems is elsewhere. They might think that maybe a mentor has it, or a book has it, or there's some knowledge that they don't have, and that's what's holding them back. But that's really never the case. If I talk to 9 out of 10 people, only 1 might need a strategy change. For 9 out of 10, the answer is to **up your level of intensity**. The best part about intensity is that it's contagious. You can actually create a culture of intensity. There's a wonderful story about Peter Thiel when he was running PayPal. Peter Thiel was the CEO of PayPal and the first investor in Facebook. I was curious because Peter Thiel is kind of a weird dude. He doesn't seem like a classic manager or an inspiring leader. He’s not super organized or running daily stand-ups. It turns out he didn't really do any of that. His common-sense system was simple: everyone in the company should figure out one priority. You should have one priority in your brain. You're going to do one thing; what's it going to be? Forcing people to figure out one priority—not a to-do list, but a single priority—was an incredible forcing function. Everybody had to say something, and if you said something stupid, it would be like, "That's your priority." So, everybody picked one priority. But now, that's good, but that's just the very first half of the battle. What's the second half? Actually sticking to that. Human nature is such that everything feels important. I have my one priority, but then there's a second thing that's important too, and then there's a third thing that's important too. The problem, as Peter said, is that imagine you have three priorities. Even if you stack rank them—saying this is number 1, number 2, number 3—what happens is that we often don't know the answer to number 1. Number 1 lacks a clear solution. It's a gnarly problem; it's an important problem, but it's not an obvious problem. So, what we do is gravitate towards the second task because it's much clearer. I know what to do there, so I gravitate towards the known. It's that Warren Buffett story where a guy lost his keys outside of a bar. He's crawling around on the ground trying to find his keys, and the officer says, "Sir, what are you doing?" He says, "I'm looking for my keys." The officer asks, "Did you drop them here?" The guy replies, "No, I dropped them over there." The officer then asks, "Well, why are you crawling over here?" The guy says, "Because this is where the light is." That's how most people operate in their day-to-day priorities. We crawl around where the light is, doing the known things, the things that feel familiar to us, rather than the important things—the things where the solution actually is over there; it's just in the dark. So, what Peter Thiel would do is if anybody tried to talk to him about something that was not their big thing, their one thing, he would literally just leave the room. He'd say, "Oh, you're talking to me about that? I thought your thing is this. Okay, see you." He wouldn't sit there and try to convince you, but he would signal to you that this is not a priority by literally just leaving the meeting or refusing to talk to you about anything besides your one thing. To Thiel, what he said was, "If you allow yourself to have more than one focus, you've already blinked." I love that: "You've already blinked; you flinched." He says, "You've determined that mediocrity is an acceptable outcome." My singular focus philosophy is that solutions may not be clear, but the path to excellence and value is. The path to excellence and value is to have a singular focus. I believe this to be true. I believe that the mind is a very powerful tool. I call the brain an answering machine; it's just about what question you ask it. If you ask yourself a bunch of questions like, "Why did this person cut me off?" your brain will tell you, "Because they're an asshole," because you've told your brain to focus its attention on why this person cut you off in traffic. You focused your powerful tool on a silly thing to focus on. The brain can really only handle one question at a time. As much as we think we can multitask, we really can't. We can just kind of solve one problem at a time. It's just a question of what are you going to load into your brain, and are you willing to let it sit there until it is solved? That Peter Thiel one-priority philosophy is a very powerful one. It's something that I implement in my day-to-day life. Alright, so first let me dispel some myths because I can already hear you in the comments. I can hear you typing away because what you're thinking is probably what I used to think, which is, "Dude, I don't want to work 24/7; that's not my goal." Well, intensity is not working 24/7. That's the first thing. Intensity is a formula, actually. It is **focus times common sense times insanity**. That's it: focus times common sense times insanity. That is what I mean when I say intensity. There's a great quote, by the way. I saw Conor McGregor, and Conor McGregor's story is insane. He went from a plumber on welfare to the highest-paid, richest athlete in the world on the Forbes list, to the first two-weight world champion in the UFC. He did this all in like 5 or 6 years, and there was a video of him after his training session.

Conor McGregor

I've lost my mind. I don't understand. Like Vincent van Gogh, he dedicated his life to his art and lost his mind in the process. That's happened to me. But that gold belt was around my waist. My mother has a big mansion. My girlfriend has a different car for every day of the week. My kids' kids have everything they ever want, and it will pay. And I'm happy. I lost my mind. Yeah, I'll die a crazy old man.

Shaan Puri

And that is the level of intensity and insanity that you can reach if you really do this at a **level 12**. Not everybody's going to want to do this at level 12, but you should know what level 12 looks like. You should understand what it is, and then you get to decide how you're going to dial that knob down. The problem most people have is they think they're already at a level 10. They don't even consider level 12. They believe they're at 10 when, in actuality, they're at 6. Today, I'm going to show you how you are at a 6 and not at a 10 because that is a lie. It's a dangerous lie we want to tell ourselves. The other misconception, by the way, is, "Oh great, I have to do more. I'm already busy, I'm already overwhelmed, and now I have to do more." No, no, no. It's actually the opposite. You are going to end up doing less. There's a great Steve Jobs quote—I'm going to butcher it—but it's basically something like, "Focus is saying no to a hundred great ideas so you can say yes to the one exceptional one." Focus is saying no to a hundred great ideas. Great ideas are ideas that you could totally make a case for, and it would seem smart for you to pursue them. But doing a hundred of them doesn't work, right? You can do anything; you just can't do everything. So, focus is saying no to the hundred great ideas so you can do the one exceptional one. If you do this right, you're not doing more; you're actually doing less. You're just doing it better.

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 a 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. 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

Okay, let's jump into some examples. I'm going to start with some business examples because there are plenty of inspirational athlete stories or general motivation, but this is a business podcast. I am all about business, so let's do the first one. The first example is Mark Zuckerberg. There's a great story about Zuck when he bought Instagram. By the way, if Facebook had not bought Instagram, Facebook might be dead. Instagram literally ended up becoming the next social network and was going to be Facebook's biggest competitor. Facebook bought it. Well, okay, that's cool. That's just a business decision, right? It's a strategy decision. No, no, no. It was a story of intensity. Here's how the story goes: the founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, used to work at a place called Odeo. He was actually kind of like an intern sitting at the desk next to this guy named Jack Dorsey. Odeo pivots to Twitter, and that becomes Twitter. Jack Dorsey ends up being the CEO of Twitter at one time, and Jack Dorsey is kind of like his mentor. So, Kevin creates Instagram. Twitter doesn't have photo sharing, and they say, "We want to buy Instagram." They offer to buy it for something like $500 million. They have the relationship, they were first to make the offer, and they offered a big sum of money. So, they did what they thought was level 12 intensity. But then Zuck came and showed them what's up. The way the story goes down is Mark Zuckerberg starts texting Kevin Systrom and says, "Hey, I want to meet. I want to talk to you about buying the company." Mark's intensity is almost legendary in the industry. So, Kevin is texting his investor and saying, "Should I meet with Zuck? I don't want to sell, and I feel like if I tell him I don't want to sell, is he just going to go into psycho mode and crush me?" The investor goes, "Yeah, probably." So, he's like, "Okay, I guess I'll take the meeting." He already has a deal on the table to sell to Twitter for $550 million. He then meets with Sequoia, the number one VC in Silicon Valley, and they say, "You know what? You should stay independent. Instagram can be big. We will fund you at $500 million." So, same valuation, but he gets to keep going and maintain his independence. But he goes to meet Zuck, and he goes, "Unlike Twitter, Zuck did not take no for an answer." So, he rejects Zuck. First, Zuck says, "No, no, no. Just come over to my house and talk. Can you just come over today?" He says, "I guess I gotta go over there. I don't want to really piss this guy off." So, he just says, "Okay, I'll just go over there." He goes to Zuck's house, and now this is Good Friday. You know, Easter is on Sunday. He goes to Zuck's house on Friday, and he walks in. Zuck says the following: "I thought about it, and I want to buy your company." Kevin's like, "I know, but I already said no." Zuck says, "I will give you double whatever you're currently raising your round at." So, whatever your price is, I'll give you double. That would mean that Instagram would be worth $1 billion, and nobody had ever paid this much for a mobile app before. This would be the first deal of its kind. Instagram had zero revenue, had less than 20 employees; it was tiny. This seemed like an outrageously over-the-top way of going about things. Zuck said, "Well, look, I can give you $1 billion for this, but here's the deal: we gotta do this deal this weekend." He basically pushed him. And this was, again, it's Easter on Sunday. Nobody's working over the weekend. The Twitter guys think they have a deal in the bag. The Sequoia guys think they have the deal in the bag. The mistake they made was they thought that work starts on Mondays, and Zuck just decided to work over the weekend. So, he basically said, "Look, let's stay here, and we'll either hash out the deal and make a deal happen, or we'll figure out that a deal is not going to happen. But let's just agree we're going to stay here and figure it out." So, he says, "Okay." They basically stayed together for 48 hours. Zuck calls his lawyers, he calls his corporate development guys, and says, "Get over here. We gotta figure out how we're going to close this deal." Now, Kevin calls his investors. He's like, "Hey, I'm thinking about having this deal." Here's the quote: one of his investors says, "I sat back and thought, what just happened? Like, holy shit, what just happened? How did he pull this off?" Zuck had this belief that if we don't create the thing that kills Facebook, somebody else will. The internet's not a friendly place. I have to act with a certain level of intensity when we find a deal that's like this. Over the weekend, just to give you perspective, to do a $1 billion deal generally takes time. Six months will go by, nine months will go by. Zuck, his lawyers, and the founder of Instagram end up cutting this deal over the weekend. They do a $1 billion deal in 48 hours, and by the time the competition woke up on Monday, the deal was gone. So, that's the story of how Zuck buys Instagram. And by the way, this is not the first time. He also bought WhatsApp. How he bought WhatsApp was the same way, and WhatsApp had the right culture. WhatsApp also operated with high intensity. There's a famous story that the founder of WhatsApp had this sticky note on his desk, and they took a picture of it when he sold it. It said, "No ads, no games, no gimmicks." That was their mindset. Every other messaging app was always adding more and more features. They would add games, they would add stickers, they would add some ads into it. They would just keep adding things. They said, "The way we're going to win is we're going to do the basic thing—messaging—and we're just going to do it better than anybody else." They were like Chick-fil-A. Have you ever been to a Chick-fil-A? You don't go to a Chick-fil-A because Chick-fil-A adds fish fillets on the menu. No, no, no. Chick-fil-A decided to have a common-sense strategy: "We're going to sell chicken sandwiches," and they just do it with a better level of intensity than anybody else. They sell a better chicken sandwich. In-N-Out does the same thing. In-N-Out is like, "We're going to sell a burger and fries." It's not a revolutionary strategy. They did not pivot; they did not innovate in that. They just brought a higher level of intensity to it than anybody else was willing to do at the time. Those two fast food chains make more money per location than chains that do ten times more things, that have a wider menu, that have more locations because they operate with a higher level of intensity. That's the same way that WhatsApp and Zuck approach business. The founder of WhatsApp always said, "The F word around here is focus." He said, "I don't think about things that I can't figure out. I don't think about the future. I don't go to conferences and give talks about where the industry is going." He goes, "I focus my brain around the things that I could wrap my head around. Like, this customer's complaining about this thing; let me go fix that bug." He said that the reason they sold to Facebook was because Zuck chased them for two years personally. He would meet them for coffee, then hike. No deal would happen, and he would keep inviting them to hikes, dinners, coffees. He did that for two years until finally they relented, and they ended up closing the deal. Okay, I want to talk to you about Stripe. One of the stories I love about Stripe comes from Paul Graham. Paul Graham was running Y Combinator (YC) at the time when Stripe went through it. He met the founders early on, and these were a couple of teenagers that were basically saying, "We're going to change the financial system. We're going to change the payment system. We're going to work with banks." He thought, "These two redheaded teenagers think that they could do this? Alright, well, I'm curious. Let's see what happens." He noted that Stripe was doing one thing very differently than the average company through YC. Remember, YC is the best of the best, so these guys were uncommon amongst the uncommon companies. He called it the "Collison installation." He said most companies, when they would talk to a potential customer, would bump into another founder. They would say, "Oh yeah, here's what we do." They would say, "Oh, that's interesting. That's cool." They would say, "Awesome, you're interested? Cool! I'll send you a link. I'll send you an invite to the beta when we're ready, and you can sign up." That's what most people do. He said what the Collisons would do was very different. We started calling this the "Collison installation," which would be as soon as somebody showed any sign of interest, they would say, "Awesome! Do you have your laptop on you? I can just set you up right now. I'll do it for you." They would literally brute force get customers on board. The person would open up their laptop, and they would literally install Stripe. They would explain it to them, and they would onboard them on the spot. They did this for the first 100 to 200 customers manually. Paul Graham noted, "I wonder why don't more people do this? It's not like this was some outrageous strategy. It's not that it was even that hard to do." He said the reason people don't do this is two things: shyness or a fear of rejection. He also mentioned a misconception. He said they think that big things come from big things, but actually, big things come from an accumulation of smaller things. That was a beautiful way of putting it to understand how a big thing happens—it's just an accumulation of smaller things. He said that many people believe that startups either take off or they don't take off, that your business either works or it doesn't work. He said, "Actually, what I've learned doing in YC is that startups happen because the founder makes them happen. They take off because the founder makes them take off." He goes, "It's like an engine. You can't force something that's never going to work to work. What you can do is if something has the potential to work, you can crank that engine manually, hand crank it to get it going, and then it starts. Once the engine starts, you know you've pushed the boulder enough; eventually, it starts to roll, and now you're chasing the momentum of it rolling downhill. But at the beginning, it felt like pushing it to the top of the hill." I thought that was a great analogy of how Stripe operated with a higher level of intensity. And if that's how they onboarded customers, imagine how they did the ten other things. Because how you do one thing is how you do everything. The trap that people fall into is thinking that the answer to their problems is elsewhere, that maybe a mentor has it, or a book has it, or there's some knowledge that they don't have, and that's what's holding them back. But that's really never the case. So rarely is that the case. Almost always, the answer you seek is within. One of the great stories about this comes from Ben Horowitz. He has this phrase: "Lead bullets, not silver bullets." He's talking about when he was running his company. They were at a very tough...

Shaan Puri

There was tough competition. The company was on the line; it was either going to go bust or they were going to figure out a way to make it. He said, "My first instinct was to pivot, to try to find a magical win, a magical solution, a rabbit out of a hat." He wanted to stand in front of his company and say, "I have the answer! I went for this walk, I met this guy, and here's the answer. We just gotta do this, and it'll all work out." But that's not really how it worked. He stood in front of the company and told them, "There are no silver bullets for this, only lead bullets." They didn't want to hear that, but he had to make it clear: we simply had to build a better product. There was no other way out. There was no window, no hole, no escape hatch, no backdoor. We had to go through the front door and deal with the big ugly guy that's blocking it. We needed lead bullets. In my experience, the thing that actually comes out of this philosophy of "there are no silver bullets" is that there actually are silver bullets. But the only way you discover them is by just firing a ton of bullets that you think are lead. Then you sort of pleasantly surprise yourself when you find one idea, one experiment, one tactic that totally works in an outsized way. You find your silver bullet, but the only way to do that is by being the guy who believes there are only lead bullets. So, I'm willing to fire all the lead bullets in order to make this work, versus the guy who's going to run around trying to just find the one magical silver bullet and really take no action. If you wanted to look at your pie chart, you should be spending maybe 10% of your time on the idea or the strategy side of things. It is important to get a good strategy, but it's usually a very common-sense strategy. If your strategy is convoluted, if it requires multiple new innovations and leaps of faith, you are likely going to fail. You are likely deluding yourself into thinking that the pie chart is 80% ideas and 20% execution. It's much more like 10 or 20% ideas and strategy, and 80% blood, sweat, and tears. That blood, sweat, and tears should come from a certain level of intensity. It's not simply about working more hours or just burying yourself in the office. There are times when you'll do that, and that's the other kind of philosophy that you should internalize: there is a time to sprint. You cannot sprint the whole time; you cannot always be running at max speed. It doesn't work that way. But you should be able to recognize when you need to change gears and when you need to sprint. One of the stories I love, and I've talked about this in the podcast before, is the story of Sylvester Stallone. Sylvester Stallone wanted to be an actor, so he went and auditioned everywhere, but he couldn't get a role. Nobody wanted to cast him as an actor. He didn't look the part; his mouth moved a little funny because he had a problem at birth. He just wasn't the classic Hollywood face. He didn't give up. He decided to take matters into his own hands. He said, "If I can't get cast in a movie, I will make a movie and I will give myself the role." The problem was he hated writing. So he decided, "For this, I gotta sprint. I am going to do this thing the best I can, but I will plow through. I will brute force my way to this." He went to his house and decided to write a movie. He wrote the first script of *Rocky*, the rough draft, in three days. Most people don't believe that's possible, but he did it in three days. He talks about how he did it. I want to read you this quote. This is Sylvester Stallone talking about focus. His daughter asked him, "Did you really paint your windows black to focus?" He goes, "Yeah, I did paint them black because I didn't want to know what time it was. It didn't matter what time it was; it was time to write. Otherwise, I would tell myself, 'Oh, it's time for breakfast,' and I would immediately derail myself. I would say, 'Well, I'm just gonna have breakfast, and I'm hungry. I don't need to know what time it is.'" That was the kind of thing; he wanted to eliminate all his possible excuses, all his possible distractions because he knew how hard it was for him to write. He was begging when he was writing, "Please, someone just call the phone. Just please get me to do anything else besides this." But instead, he unplugged the phone so that nobody could call. He painted the windows black. He says, "100% black windows, no phone." That approach of painting the windows black is a certain level of intensity. He doesn't do it all the time, but he knew there was a time to sprint. One of the key things in life is to identify when a great opportunity comes your way or when it's time to buckle down. This is the moment; you're going on one path or the other path, and that is the time to sprint. That is the time you dial up your level of intensity. So, I have three actions for you. How do you actually go do this? 1. **Narrow your focus.** I did a whole podcast on this called *Laser Focus*. Go watch that; it's like 20 minutes long, and it's good. You need to narrow your focus. Stop giving your brain so many different priorities and problems to think about. You need to narrow it down. That's the first thing: focus. 2. **Write down your common-sense solution.** I call it a common-sense solution because that's the check. Your solution to your problem should sound very easy. It should sound as simple as, "I gotta go figure out why all these people are churning, canceling their subscription. I need to go solve that," or "I need to make a better product." I need to make a product so good that people want to share it. That's my strategy: make a product so good that people want to share it. My strategy is, "I need to make 30 sales calls a day." If I want sales to grow, I just need to do more calls—30 a day. I'm going to take a giant sticky note, write 30 on it, and every day I'm going to cross that 30 out. Then tomorrow, I'm going to wake up, and the first thing I do is write the big number 30 again. By the way, this is something I actually did for my companies: write a giant number on the wall, and that number is the one thing I need to do today. If I do that one thing alone, I have made today successful. 3. **Ask yourself, "What would level 12 intensity look like?"** Just as a thought experiment, you don't even have to do it, but just ask yourself that question. If I dialed the intensity knob all the way to 12, what would that look like? What would I actually do? Now, I'll give you a very simple example. A lot of people, probably you out there listening to this, have had a goal at some point...

Shaan Puri

In the pursuit of getting in better shape, right? You want to lose weight, run a marathon in a certain time, or simply get into the best shape of your life. We've taken what we think is a level 10 intensity to this. I did the best I could do. I hired a coach, wrote down my goals, and tried, but it just didn't work out well. Jesse Itzler, a guy who's been a guest on this podcast, had the same goal as you. He wanted to get in the best shape of his life, specifically the best running shape. So what did he do? He hired a Navy SEAL to come live in his house and "whoop his ass" every day. He said, "I will do everything you tell me to do. Whatever time you tell me to wake up, I will wake up. Whatever many miles you tell me to run, I'll run." He would train 2 to 3 times a day for 30 days straight. He ate exactly what this guy said, drank exactly what this guy said, did pull-ups when this guy said to do pull-ups, and ran when this guy said to run. It was raining, hailing, and freezing cold outside, but he would get out there and run. That Navy SEAL, by the way, was David Goggins. This was before David Goggins was even popular. He hired David Goggins to come live in his house for 30 days. Goggins would come into the bedroom where he and his wife were sleeping and wake him up, saying, "Wake up, bitch! We're running!" Now, that was level 12 intensity. The sad part is, we don't even know what level 12 looks like until we've heard something like this. So if I did one thing for you today, I hope I just inspired you to go figure out what level 12 intensity even looks like. Maybe from the examples I gave you today or from some people in your life. Find a way to see it and ask yourself, "What does level 12 look like if I ratcheted up the intensity of the thing I'm already doing?" That's it.