The Biggest Lies of Silicon Valley

The part that people don’t understand about wealth, success, just living a better life, having the life that you and I both live, which I think is pretty wonderful, it’s a multi generational journey. People don’t realize that. My great great grandfather came over from Germany with his wife, with nothing, and they worked basically their entire lives at jobs that sucked, so that their kids could have a little bit more of an advantage, which in their case was to, like, go to the public schools in a decent area, and then have a chance to go to college.

My grandparents then didn’t go to college. They didn’t do that, but they joined unions. They went into the military, joined unions, worked their whole life to send my parents to a little bit of a better school, and have a little better upbringing, more stability, air conditioner, TV, and my parents are working their entire lives to make things just a little bit better for me. So we live in a day and age where everybody wants it all right now. We all want to get rich in twelve months, three years, five years, and when we look at very successful immigrant families, they play a different game.

They play a multi generational game, and they’re willing to sacrifice and delay gratification to the point where they themselves may never actually get that gratification. They’re just going to watch their offspring and their kids and grandkids do that. That’s really inspiring to me. When you ask what I’m running from, I’m running from taking a step backwards. I I look at it as a baseball game. My great grandparents came over to do that first at bat with nothing. They left their kids on first base.

They left my parents on second base so that I could be left on third base, and I want to leave my kids a couple steps from home plate and set them up to do more of what they want do and add

I’m on a personal mission to kind of change that narrative, because I do think that a lot of what we see on social media from wealthy entrepreneurs and successful business people, you know, the titans of industry in our modern era, is the sexy stuff. It’s the world changing ideas. It’s the get rich in a college dorm room type story, and most stories that I hear from, again, families that are playing this game, this generational game of success and wealth and just living a better life. Very few

I think the interesting thing about this world is that we’re encouraged, again, by culture. We’re encouraged to try to be the best in the world at something. And these folks will say it, and they’ll be honest, and they’ll say, in order to be the best in the world, you cannot be very good at really anything else. You’re obsessing. And we look at our most successful business moguls of all time, and many of them, that’s the case. Unhealthy, broken families, not that great of parents, just singularly focused on business entrepreneurship health of their companies, not their bodies and their families, and I would have to kind of agree with that.

That if you want to be the best, if you want to be the richest in the world, if you want be the best business person in the world, you have to live an unbalanced life, and that you can’t actually be the best in the world at two things. So the ego, our personal egos will will say, well, shit. If everybody else is on a journey to be the best, I want to be the best, I can be the best, I should work hard enough to where I am a legend and I am the best.

That’s what our egos will tell us, but in my opinion, a more realistic approach is to, yes, play the game of business at a high level, which we we’re going to talk about a lot in this conversation.

Do amazing things with, you know, leverage and delegation so that you can be successful as an entrepreneur and a business person in your career, but that life is several different gardens, you have a a marriage, and you have the fact that you’re a parent, and that you have a physical body that you need to care for, and take care of, and make last a really long time, and then you have relationships with your friends, you have hobbies, you have these different areas of life that are very important.

When I look at people who are happiest, people who live a long time and can walk around the airport at 75 years old instead of getting wheeled through the airport in a wheelchair, basically, when I see those people, they have balance. Maybe they’ve kind of just said, I don’t have the ego or the who am I trying to prove that I’m the best in the world at one thing? I am not LeBron James. I’m not Elon Musk. I don’t need to be that, but I can live and be a good parent, a good husband, have a good strong body.

The lie that we tell ourselves is that we can’t play the game at a high level, the game of business, our careers, that we can’t play that game at a high level without being unbalanced. The hustle culture on Twitter and all over the Internet will say, it’s all about work. I’m working seventy hours a week. My career is first. That’s glorified. The startup founders who have worked long hours, they’re they’re kind like gladiators. Right? They’re viewed in a different light. It does take a little bit of a you know, we got to swallow our ego and pride and say, hey, look, I’m gonna leave a little bit of money on the table here, but my life overall is gonna be more rewarding.

Because in my opinion, there’s nothing more rewarding than being a good parent, a good spouse, have amazing relationships with friends and family members, which I know you’re also super passionate about. And then also being like physically fit, be be a physical specimen and feel strong and healthy, I think that we can do it. I think that you can play this game of business at a really high level working thirty hours a week. And the people who say that they can’t, and that they have to work seventy hours a week are are kind of working

a unique person to do what I do, which is write thoughts of my own, and ideas, and stories from my past on the Internet, and compete for likes and follows. That game is a game that I’m not proud that I play, because it just shows that I do care a lot about what people think, and we got on this call and immediately you said, you know, Nick, I really respect that reading your stuff, I can tell that you just don’t care what people think, and that would be that would be a lie.

Like, I’m putting on a front that I don’t care, but we all care, like, we all care. I care deeply about what the people closest to me think of me, but it’s hard not to care what people think, and that’s why I tweet and get followers and trying to build a personal brand, so the insecurity and fear of failure is evident, and the people who don’t talk about it, entrepreneurs who just say, all this is easy for me, are lying, because business is really hard. Putting yourself out there is really, really hard.

I think the interesting thing about being a notable person, whether it be an influencer or a leader of any kind, is that you cannot please everybody. Number one, I can’t please everybody. It’s impossible. I’m going to do what I can do to, you know, please the most amount of people, but I can’t possibly ever please them all. The second one is that you’re gonna get a lot of hate that you can’t respond to, and that you cannot defend yourself from. It’s impossible for me to defend myself from all the different thoughts and conversations that are going on.

Almost all of them are happening when I’m not present, when I’m not there, and that is a tough part of about playing this game, and it is absolutely, you know, drives some insecurity fear.

I think every bit of hate has to be weighed from who you’re getting it from, and there’s a fact about the world that’s a very sad part of the world that we find out when we’re kids and we’re in classrooms full of 30 individuals. People are very mean to each other. A lot of people are very mean to each other. Kids are very mean to each other. High schoolers are very mean to each other, and adults are very mean to each other, and it all stems from jealousy, in my opinion.

It all stems from jealousy. And if I had to say it, maybe 80% of the world has varying levels of jealousy and hate towards people who win, people who succeed, people who thrive, And maybe 20 or 30% of them, it’s serious, like, they are literal crabs in a bucket instead of instead of helping people lift other people up and try to make other people’s lives better, they’re literally pulling other people down to make themselves lift up, because they think that that’s how they can get better and improve.

There’s a saying in real estate like, there’s two ways to own the largest building in town. One way is to build the largest building in town. The second way is to tear down all the buildings that are taller than your own building. That second one, tearing other people down is way easier. It’s way easier than building the largest building in town. Making yourself more successful, doing the work on yourself to thrive and succeed is way harder than shitting on all the people who actually do. It’s a sad reality that we can never get away from.

So, yes, it hurts when people hate. We just have to do our best to be secure enough in our own actions, our own thoughts, you know, the way that we’re we’ve chose to go about life that we’re gonna continue on and keep fighting.

I have a theory that there’s a very dangerous thing about being successful, especially when you’re notable, and you have 300,000 people on Twitter hanging on your every word. It can get very dangerous, because you start to be your own idol. You start to be your own god, and you start to think that, oh, maybe I am just special. Maybe I am. Look at all these ways that I’m winning. Look at all these people who really hang on every word that I say, and that gets very, very, very dangerous.

And if you don’t have an open mind, you start filtering information based on what supports your opinions, and you can lose massive amounts of money. You can turn into a complete asshole, and you can change for the worst, and it happens to a lot of successful people. Now, I have a little sticker on my mirror above my sink, because my grandfather gave me amazing advice. Said, Nick, you’re gonna do amazing things in life, but if you don’t remain humble and kind to people around you, it’ll all be for naught, and you’re going to pass on things to your kids that are not great.

You’re going to, instead of be a positive influence on a lot of people’s lives, you’re going become a negative influence. I have this little sticker on my mirror that I see every morning when I brush my teeth. It says, change your mind on something today. So what you see on Twitter is me having very strong beliefs, contrarian beliefs, unique viewpoints, but honestly, they’re very loosely held. They’re loosely held. So there’s no real way to get smarter than having 300,000 people reading your thoughts and responding, and calling you out when you’re wrong, especially the notable people and the ones who have the reputation inside of our communities, but also in business.

I have six or seven employees in my companies, you know, there’s three or 400 people now across the mall, but there’s six or seven that I trust their opinions enough, where I encourage them constantly to call me out. Call me out. Hey, I want you to constantly be sending everything I say, watch my Twitter, watch me in meetings, watch the decisions of these companies that we’re running together, and any time you think I’m wrong, come to me right away and call me out. I don’t want to surround myself with yes people.

I want to surround myself with people who are looking for what’s right, and sometimes it’s tough, and it’s happened to me in a couple of my companies where one of my employees says, Nick, I disagree with x y and z and here’s why, and immediately, I get defensive. I have my own complex of success in leading this company, where I’ll admit that it’s not always easy to hear this stuff, and my employees aren’t always right. We have a discussion, but it makes me better, and it allows me to make better decisions, and protect myself from blind spots, and and potential losses, and and poor decisions when it comes to strategies, investments, and guiding these companies that I’m starting.

Absolutely. I’m a lot more nuanced. I’m a lot more moderate on so many different opinions, but look, that is not how you build a brand. You can hate me. You can hate me if you want, but I am just playing a game. The rules are the rules. I’m gonna play the game as well as I possibly can. The people who know me in person understand that it that I’m a lot different than the Nick that you read about on Twitter. What do you think are the rules to the game?

The rules to the game is that if you don’t have anything unique, if you don’t bring a new perspective to the conversation, nobody’s gonna give a shit about following you. People don’t wanna hear the same ideas echoed back and forth. There’s already enough echo chambers in our life. We’re surrounded by our family, which are all in the same world that we are in, and begin to believe the same things that we believe, and then in our companies, we’re all rowing the ship the same way. We’re echoing ideas right off each other.

It’s a big echo chamber. Online communities are no different. The people who hang out in anti work Reddit, they all feel the same way about companies and capitalism, and they’re echoing ideas and and just making each other more and more and more radical. Twitter is no different, so when you can be open minded and be nuanced on Twitter, it’s not interesting. If you’re just gonna echo the same things back and forth from everybody else and just share the same ideas that everybody else is sharing, you’re not gonna be interesting.

I think delegation is a lost art. Delegation is not ingrained in human beings. It is not taught to us in school. There’s no teacher in the world that is gonna say, Nick, I want you to write a four page report on this book, but I want you to get somebody else to read the book, and I want you to get somebody else to write the report. It’s nonexistent in sports. Your coach is never gonna be like, hey, Nick, I want you to do three circuits of these exercises at track practice, but I want you to find some freshman to do those exercises for you while you sit back and them.

You go to you go to college and you start to study books and science and and all these different things, and the answer’s always a couple steps back, and it’s about you doing the work. All of it is about you doing the work, and you becoming competent in doing the work yourself. Some can argue that it’s the industrial revolution of the way the government needed to create schools and a culture to create employees that can go to work and follow the rules. Like, hey, sit in a seat and do the same job over and over again.

If we build a workforce that can do that, America will thrive. But also, just delegation is really hard. So what happens is you have a bunch of 21, 22, 23 year olds graduating college, and they have zero experience delegating. Then they go to their first job, they’re told what to do by somebody who has some level of delegation, and they can go five, ten, twenty, thirty years without ever delegating. Ever. Ever delegating. So it’s totally unnatural. Nobody in any area of the world is gonna be primed and prepped to delegate.

So therefore, very few people actually know how to do it. And if you’re an entrepreneur listening to this, this is gonna speak right to your soul, but if you’re an employee listening to this, it still speaks to you, because there’s two ways to make a lot of money as an employee at a company. One is to do your job really well. You can make great money that way. But if you want to get paid phenomenally well at a company, phenomenally well, get other people to do their jobs well.

Delegate to them. Build teams. Be able to manage people. They’re the ones who are compensated the most. So this is the most powerful people in the world, in companies, in entrepreneurship, in management hierarchies at Fortune 500 companies, in government, in organizations. They’re all master delegators. The power flows up to the people who know how to delegate and control other people. Now, when it comes to delegation, there’s there’s two levels of delegation. Number one is just telling somebody what to do. Hey, Harry. I need help with x.

Log in and do x. This is how you do it. Here’s the directions. That’s level number one. Honestly, pretty successful organizations can be built with only one person making all the decisions, and everybody else just doing individual jobs and looking up to that one person. That’s the first level of delegation is just tasks. The second level of delegation, which is way harder, and way more uncomfortable, and one in a thousand people can do well, is delegating decisions. Okay?

So I’m not just going to tell Harry what to do, I’m going to tell Harry what needs done, and he’s going to make decisions as they come, and he’s gonna solve problems, and he’s gonna answer people’s questions, and he’s gonna live in a more dynamic situation where he’s actually making decisions. And as a business owner, you can get really far with only delegating tasks. There’s businesses that I know of, friends of mine who own companies that are doing $1.02, $3,000,000 a year of EBITDA, and they are the only

Absolutely. As a manager of people, your job is to get a look into somebody’s brain and constantly be judging their ability to delegate. When you start a company and you have a small team, imagine all the employees, this is a way to think about this. Imagine you’re the boss, and you’re sitting in the corner office, and you have five employees, they’re all doing tasks. Every day, they walk into your office with a problem that they need solved. That problem is a monkey that’s on their back.

Imagine a monkey literally just raising hell, pulling out hair, pulling their hat off. That’s the problem. They walk into your office, and they say, hey, Nick. I’ve got a problem, and they tell you their problem, and instantly, that monkey jumps off of their back and onto your desk. Now, it’s your problem as a business owner. Most business owners are just gonna send the employee away and keep the monkey for themselves, the problem. And then all day, employees are walking in, and monkeys are getting dropped off in your office.

And before you know it, your entire company’s a zoo. You are the bottleneck. You’re the zookeeper. You’re putting away monkeys, and all the problems are your problems. The way to do it is, an employee walks in and they give you a problem, and you’re gonna make sure that they walk out of your office with that monkey. They’re gonna take it. They’re not gonna leave the monkey in your office, so you’re asking them questions. You come to me, Harry Harry, Nick, I got this big problem. Okay.

Get out of my way. I’ll solve the problem. That’s the way most business owners do it, and they never start to trust their employees to actually make decisions and solve problems. But if you ask that employee a question, hey, how would you solve this problem? Here’s the goals of the company. What do you think about it? And they start talking. Two things happen. Number one, they get practice making decisions now. And number two, you’re getting to see right into their mind about how they make those decisions and start to build trust.

Some of them are gonna talk in circles and you’re gonna be like, okay, well, obviously, they have absolutely no idea how to solve this problem. But some of them are gonna start to do really well. They’re gonna start to answer your questions and say, oh, I understand. I can think about it this way. This is what I would do. You’re gonna send them off to solve the problem, then they’ll come back to you with another problem. If they keep coming back to you with the same one over and over again, you kind of know maybe they’re not thinking about things the same way.

But all my employees, when they come to me with a problem, they know they better also come to me with a solution, and I start to listen to their solutions, I start to listen to their thoughts, and I start to build trust with them. The more problems that they prove that they can solve, the more responsibilities I’ll give. It’s absolutely an evolution where you’re getting a look into the mind of your employees, seeing how they would solve problems by talking to them, working through it, and also having them bring solutions, you can trust them more and more and more over time.

Because look, when the employee walks in with that monkey, you know that it’s more of a pain in your butt to get them to tend to their own monkey at first. It’s more of a pain for them to handle the monkey than for you to just take the monkey and put it back in his cage, because yes, you can do it in one minute, whereas telling them, and teaching them, and working with them, and coaching them on how to solve their problems takes more time, and they’re not gonna do it as well.

So, it it’s a process, but what happens is it it it’s a snowball. It accumulates. The momentum picks up, and if you start to work with these employees and invest in these employees and give them more tasks, it starts to roll down the hill. They start to get better and better, and before you know it, they’re actually better than you, and you have no idea what’s going on inside of your own company. It it’s a pretty amazing feeling.

stress and problems and losses of trust are are a result of one of two things. One, they’re not good enough at their job. They’re not working hard enough. It’s a competence issue. They’re just not good enough. Number two is a moral issue where they don’t have your best interest in heart, and they are making decisions that are gonna benefit them and actually hurt you, lying, stealing, cheating, and so on. Both of those, you have to make the decision right then, and like, okay, do I keep investing in this person?

Do I keep giving them more more things, or do I take things off their plate, get this person out of my company altogether? It’s tough. That’s why this is so hard. Managing people, everything in business is a people problem. You’re managing people, you’re managing their emotions, you’re managing them, lying, stealing, cheating, not working hard, doing whatever. It’s not easy. That’s why managers get paid the big bucks.

I wish that my entire Twitter was automated so I could get off of it for a year, and and the tweets would keep flowing, but a lot of my tweets are made by my team. They’re reposts from either my newsletter or written from a interview like this or something along those lines, but I am operating at an area of really high leverage, but it wasn’t always that way. I mean, five years ago, I was driving a box truck around the streets of Boston, So I’ve made a lot of strides when it comes to delegation.

Overestimating somebody’s competence is a tremendous mistake, and there’s no backtracking from it. If you think that somebody can handle it and they can’t, that’s those are the worst. Mean, because hiring somebody is expensive, it’s time consuming, training them up is expensive and time consuming, and getting to the point where you’ve done both of those expensive and time consuming things, and realize that the person’s just not good enough to do the job, that hurts. And it’s unavoidable. It literally is unavoidable. I hire fast, and I fire fast.

I’m not gonna go send somebody through 10 interviews. I’m going to get somebody in my company, I’m going start giving them little things to work on, and then I’m going to give them more and more and more trust as they prove that they can handle it. Early on, I was really serious about, you know, top grading and personality tests, and doing all this crazy shit with hiring to try to figure out who’s a good fit, and I’m still making bad hires, and I realize, hey, the only real way that I can figure out if somebody’s good is to get them in and to get them to start working.

I am not good enough. Some people are. Some people are good enough that in a 10 round interview, they can figure out this person’s gonna be highly effective. I am not arrogant enough to think that I could do that, so I’ve got it to a point now where I hire fast, fire fast. It wasn’t always that way, and it was it was a mistake for me.

It’s really hard to do. There is no easy way to fire somebody. You talk about what it’s like as a business owner and why it’s not for everybody. One of the things I’ve changed my mind on is that five years ago, I thought entrepreneurship was for everybody, and now today, I I don’t believe that anymore. I think the fact that you have to let somebody go in your company who was in your wedding three weeks earlier, and they’re crying in your arms, looking at your eyes, saying, how am I gonna you know, my wife’s pregnant.

What am I gonna do, Nick? What what do you want me to do when you gotta let them go? And I’ve done it a lot of times, and it never ever ever gets easier.

I think the average competence of human beings is a lot lower than everybody would think. Or the average we’ll just talk about America for a second. The average American is thirty pounds overweight, they have less than a thousand dollars in their checking account, and they’re just trying to do as little as possible to get paid next Friday so that they can go drink six beers with their buddies and watch Netflix. That’s just the truth. We surround ourselves online with high performers, people who want to own companies, and we forget that most people, a, don’t care.

And if you’ve ever hired people, if you’ve ever built teams, you understand that a lot of people are not good at making these decisions that are required of entrepreneurs. We talk about delegation and decisions and and the constant nuance and uncertainty of being an entrepreneur. You’re making incomplete decisions with incomplete information, and it’s very high stakes. It’s very uncomfortable. That is not for everybody. That is obviously not for everybody. Five years ago, I thought everybody should be an entrepreneur. This is the path to wealth, the sweaty startup mentality, you know, forget tech culture.

Let’s build small businesses, anybody can do this. Today, I think I couldn’t have been more wrong. I think 95% of people are way better off going and working for a company, earning great money, building their skills over time, focusing on other areas of life that is not business and entrepreneurship.

I think VCs are rightly positioned to do the things that VCs do best, which is the tail case of value add, which is making a few people’s life better, and then those things over years trickle down to the masses. To change the world, you have to start with the elite. You have to start with how companies interact. You have to start with doing all these little things to make companies more efficient and make the world more efficient, and those things do require venture capital. And and the goal of venture capital is to find those edge cases.

So yes, they’re very well positioned in that regard, but I think when the VCs and the tech guys and the people who live in venture, you know, in LA and and New York City and San Francisco, when they’re talking about business in general, one must understand that these folks have not been in a Walmart in ten years. They have they just haven’t been in one. They haven’t they haven’t looked at the average American. They have no idea what the average American thinks about, looks for, eats, does with their free time.

They have no idea the way most Americans are interacting with the world, because they’re in a bubble. They’re in a bubble of elite, unique people. There’s very, very famous influencers on Twitter and in the tech world who think they actually think artificial intelligence and software will control the entire world. They think that it’ll solve every problem, and that nobody will need to work, because software will solve all the problems. What they don’t understand is that when you close your computer and when you look outside, there’s every single person spends 97% of their time in a physical building, turning on faucets with water coming out, hoping that cold air comes out of a hole in their ceiling so that they can stay cool in the summer.

Those things are not cleaned, built, maintained by software, and they never will be. There’s a huge part of the world that is localized and physical, and

I’m not concerned with it. I think it’s a very natural phenomenon, and if you try to fight it, you’re fighting a battle that has stood the test of two thousand years of civilization as it has advanced. You could take all the money in The United States right now. You take all the money, and you could divide it equally among everybody. Take all the money and divide it equally, and in five, ten, fifteen years, you could argue about the time frame.

In five years, at least 80% of the cash would be in the hands of 20% of the people. 80% of power would be in the hands of 20% of the people, and in ten or twenty years, 1% of the people would control the world again, because there’s people who know how to make money, and there’s people who know how to buy things that make money, and invest, and build companies, and delegate, and build things of value, and there’s a vast majority of people who only know how to spend money.

They know how to go to work, make money, and spend it, and this stuff’s a skill. It is an ability, and income inequality is natural. It always has been natural. I’m not worried about it, because today, the poorest people in America have a better life than the wealthiest people in America fifty years ago. They have better access to health care. They have better living situations. They have more amenities. They have better food. It trickles down massively, at least in developed countries.

A lot of entrepreneurs kind of brag about the fact that they’re not gonna give anything to their kids. They say it like, I’m going to give all my money away, and my kids will get their own cash or opportunity or whatever it is. I think that is such a cop out to the art of parenting. My job as a parent is not to, oh, your dad’s rich, you’re not rich. You go back to first base, and let’s see if you can make it. That’s not my job.

My job is to raise kids, to build a family that can handle the wealth, that knows how to make people’s lives better, can invest the money, not try to just avoid it altogether. It’s like saying, hey, my son’s name is Timothy. Hey, Timothy. You are not allowed to drink a beer your entire life. I’m not gonna ever give you a beer. I expect you never to drink one, and now go out into the world and handle it. The first day at college, they’re gonna get so obliterated that they just don’t understand, and and it’s gonna it could potentially ruin their life.

Money is the same way. Like, I’m going to teach my kids how to handle money, teach my kids how to think about money, and I’m gonna set them up with all the opportunities that I possibly could. Why would I do all this work to build this network, to build these companies, to build generational wealth, if I’m not gonna pass on some of that advantage to the people who are literally my children?

I think money only amplifies the human. If you’re a shitty person, money’s gonna amplify that. If you’re a great person, money can amplify that and can impact a lot of people. The mistake that people make is thinking that life is easy for people who are rich. And look, life is hard for everybody, and it’s relative. Of course, it’s relative. There are people who are trying to figure out where they’re gonna get their next meal. I’m not trying to downplay that, but life is hard for everybody, no matter how wealthy you are, matter how much money you have.

You can’t get away from all the basic, shitty administrative tasks that you got to do in life. You can’t get away from the hangover. You can’t get away from the travel delays. You can’t get away from the rain that just opens up and pours out of the sky when you’re trying to host a barbecue in your backyard.

You can’t get away from the fact that, hey, oh my gosh, I’m 35 years old, and I’m starting to get some fat that just sticks to my body, and I got to figure out how to keep it You can’t get away from a lot of things, and also relationships are really hard, and money amplifies a good relationship, and money amplifies a shitty relationship with your spouse or with your family. So having a lot of money is a pretty serious responsibility, and it all comes down to struggle and your ability to deal with stress.

Stress is relative. An example, there’s two people. They both get a flat tire in the middle of nowhere with no cell reception. One other person runs a company, and they’ve dealt with a lot of problems, they’ve dealt with a lot of stress in their life, and one the person one of the people that lives in their parents’ has had everything taken care of for them, has a trust fund, has an American Express, and has super rich parents where they just take the jet and go where they need to go.

The person who is used to dealing with stress, they’re going to figure out how to solve it, fix the flat, and they’re going drive home, and they’re going to forget to tell their spouse about that flat tire at dinner. It’s going be a non issue for them. The other person, it’s gonna ruin the week. They’re gonna have anxiety about driving again. They’re gonna tell everybody they know. That flat tire is a serious stress for them, because they have no stress in their life. You have to teach your kids.

I’m gonna teach my kids how to struggle with grace. I’m going to let them practice making decisions. I’m not gonna put them in a bubble, so that all the decisions are made for them, and that they get out into the real world, and it’s time for them to make decisions, but they have no practice, and they’re horrible decision makers, and I’m gonna let them struggle. I’m not gonna protect them from hardship, and hurt, and pain. I’m not gonna coddle them, and I think if I can teach them how to struggle with grace, and deal with hard things, with a positive attitude, I I think that I’ll be able to raise decent kids.

life. How much do you protect your kids? How much do you coddle them? And how much do you let them figure out and solve their own problems? A wealthy person has a high school kid who gets a DUI. They get a DUI. They have two options. They call their friend who they play golf with who is the judge and get them off the hook, or they make their kids spend two nights in jail and live with the consequences of that DUI. I’d like to think that I’m gonna make my kids live with the consequences of their decisions.

They’re gonna live that if they make a poor decision, if they drive their car too fast and crash it, if they don’t put a case on their iPhone and it shatters, they’re going to live with the consequences of that poor decision. If they ride their bike too fast and they fall, they’re gonna live with it. I just hope that I can teach them to not make those big mistakes that can screw up your life. Does your wife agree? No. I think, you know, this might be a touchy subject, but I think that my job and her job are totally different.

Okay. How so? Well, look, my wife’s role and her natural ability is to care for them and protect them from pain and nurture them and teach them how to be loving. My job as an adult is, especially for my boys, is to teach them to be strong. I I have to raise strong kids that can deal with hardship, we have so we have two different roles there.

People get way too serious about trying to find that person. I think if you find somebody who you’re physically attracted to, you’re emotionally stimulated mentally and emotionally stimulated by, and you can trust them, that’s number one. If you can trust them, odds are you can make a marriage work. That sounds brash, but many people are way too picky today about who they marry. They should have gotten married a long time ago to one of those girls that they thought wasn’t perfect in some way. But me and my wife have very similar moral views, and how we think about household responsibilities and jobs, and who does what.

And she thinks, and I think as well, that her raising kids is 10 times more important than a career. The child that you create is way more important than her having a career, and she is also in that camp. In our house, my job is to take care of the finances and be a good dad and be around, do all the things I’m supposed to do, and her job is to take care of these kids and grow human beings, which I think is a bit more important than growing a business for somebody who you don’t even have equity in that business.

Yeah. I’m exhausted when I get home. Like, I’m gonna get off of this interview, and I got three more meetings today, and then I gotta work out, and then I’m gonna get to dinner with her, and yes, I’ll have to turn it on to pull up some more energy to have a conversation with her. The sad part is is that women are so isolated. They’re so isolated. There’s no community. Fifty years ago in small town America, all the sisters and siblings and friends lived on one block, and they were popping in each other’s houses, and they were having dinner constantly, and it was a community.

They were raising kids as a community. The women were together. And today, men build businesses in lonely environments, and women raise kids in lonely environments, and it can be really hard if you have that traditional structure.

Oh, god. Yes. Absolutely. The number one thing that you can do to set your children up for failure is to protect them from the fact that life is brutal. Life is hard. You have hard decisions to make. It’s hard dealing with people. It’s hard making money. It’s hard working for companies. It’s hard staying in shape. It’s hard building relationships. It’s hard having friendships. Everything worth doing in life is hard. Anything worth doing in life is hard. Being married is hard. Being a parent is hard. Building a company is hard.

Staying fit is hard. Anything worth doing is hard in life. So why is our job as a parent to put a bubble around our kids so that they don’t deal with any pain? It doesn’t make any sense to me. The more well off a parent and family can is, the more they coddle their kids, and the more they try to keep them from feeling pain, like I was saying, dealing with these decisions and and living with the consequences of poor decisions. So if you’re not going to teach your kids to struggle and have a positive attitude through the struggle, they’re not going to win at life, man.

They’re just not going to win at life. They’re going to be soft. They’re to blame other people for their problems. They’re going to have the victim mentality that we hate so much on social media. It’s a parenting problem, for sure.

I wish we would have started a little bit earlier. Now that I’m having these kids and we’re on the way up, and I have one that’s about to turn six years old, and I can have mentally stimulating conversations with him, and I’m really starting to be able to teach him. In the early years, they want their mom, and their mom is the number one influence in them. And this kid is finally starting to find interest in dad. Dad, I wanna go on a hike. Dad, I wanna go camping.

Dad, I wanna go play golf with you. Dad is so much fun and rewarding that I just wish that we would have got started earlier. I think it’s a duty. It is my duty as a person who I think at least that I have my shit together when it comes to parenting, that I’m gonna raise decent kids. It’s my duty to create as many as I possibly can. I wish that we would have started a little bit earlier, so we could have six, seven, eight kids.

Kids are the most amazing thing about life. Why would you delay that? Kids made me stronger. They made me more focused. They made me more motivated. They made me more driven. They made me more protective of my time.

did they make you more

and

I had a measuring stick for time when that baby was born. It wasn’t just wrinkles in the side of my eyes that became a little bit more apparent every year. I had a human being that was growing. And I know now, in seven days, I’ll be six years post the birth of my first child. I got extremely motivated when that child was born. I got more focused on the future and generational planning, and I got more focused on what I can do to be a better human being.

I was less interested in wasting time on the weekends. I was less interested in friendships that weren’t mutually beneficial, and I just improved. I I improved. My entire goal in life is to be an old man sitting in a leather chair in a big ass house with kids and grandkids running everywhere. I’m saying, like, tearing the shit out of my house. I want new babies that can barely walk, bumping their head on my coffee table, and I want 12, 13 year olds running around with Nerf guns, busting holes in the walls.

I want complete chaos, maybe it’s a holiday, but I want to raise family members that want to spend time with me. That’s my whole goal as a parent. Number one goal, I will have succeeded as a parent if my kids want to spend time with me even when they’re no longer under my roof. After they go off to college, if they want to be around me, I’ll have succeeded.

Yeah. It is the environment I was brought up in. Yeah. We had three kids, small town, conservative values, went to church. Gender roles were prevalent in my community and culture when I was young, and my wife is the same. Like, we both just feel amazingly proud. Every morning, we go downstairs, we have our coffee, we sit in our chair, and we watch our three kids just play, and we play with them and hang out with them, and we look at each other almost several times a week, and we’re like, can you believe that we built this?

Like, look at these things. They’re us. It’s spectacular.

I definitely am careful about what I say. I’m not uncancelable yet. I know that I need to be careful. I have a small window in time to build these companies to capitalize on my personal brand, and I know that if I get canceled, it will set me back in my mission to get these points of view across to a lot of people. That being said, I think this woke mindset and virus is a tremendous advantage for me and my family, because the people who buy into it are victims.

The people who buy into it are blaming other people. The people who buy into it are focusing on things that are totally outside of their control. I don’t do that, and my kids are not going to do So we’re going have a competitive advantage against everybody who spends time focusing on things that don’t matter, and worries about things that they can’t control, and blames other people for their problems.

So absolutely, it’s going to be a net positive for me, because people who raise their kids to be accountable, they raise strong kids, they raise their kids to suffer with grace, they raise their kids to be good stewards of money, it’s gonna be playing a game on easy mode while everybody else is out pointing fingers at everybody else.

The problem with advice is that it gives you a false sense of productivity. People are listening to this podcast, and they’re nodding along, and they’re thinking, wow, this podcast is making me better. And then they go home and get on YouTube, and they listen to more advice, and they get on Twitter and listen to more advice, and before they know it, they’ve listened to a full day of advice, and they’re thinking, before they went to bed, wow, I’m doing a lot. This is great.

If you’re not doing anything in the real world, if you’re not trying to advance your career, if you’re not trying to get better, if you’re not making yourself better by doing things that are hard and getting uncomfortable, the advice, using your words, the advice could mean fuck all to you. Like, does not matter. Like, if you’re not in the trenches building a company, you’re not gonna be able to listen to anything anybody says and actually apply it. You can take advice for twenty, thirty years and get nowhere, because you’re not actually doing anything, and that’s the hard part.

And also is that everybody who gives advice is a successful person, because, you know, you gotta have a resume to to make your advice weighted, so all the people who have the most clout and status on Twitter, they’re all successful people, and getting advice from successful people is very risky, because successful people look at the world totally different than you do, and that I do, and that we did when we were young and not successful yet. So what you have is a lot of people who are not successful yet getting advice from successful people.

The successful people, they feel totally different about wealth and risk, because they already have it, and they’re trying to protect it. It’s not like that they don’t have it, and they’re trying to get it. You see what I’m saying? They’re in different phases of life, and what worked for them might not work for you.

Yes. I went from wealth creation mode early in my career. And look, this is just the perfect example. If somebody came to me, and they were 25 years old, and they were me, and they had my first storage deal that I built from the ground up, that changed my entire life and made me millions of dollars, if they had that sitting on a desk in front me right now, I would tell them not to do it, because I wouldn’t do it, because it was too risky.

Does that make sense? Like, the deal that we built for 2,900,000, it’s worth 11,000,000 now, I’ve made over $2,000,000 personally on that deal, it changed my life, I would tell somebody probably not to do, looking back at what decisions we made at the very beginning of building that building. How messed up is that?

Yes. Money is drastically underrated in this world today. The people who say that money doesn’t matter are full of shit. Let’s just say it. Nobody says it. The identity of a man as a man, nobody gives a crap about you. Nobody cares about you. When you’re born, and when you grow up, nobody cares. You have to go out, and it’s your job, and most families, to go out and get what can make your family’s life better, and every single thing in life worth doing costs money, whether it’s healthcare that you have to have, whether it’s an education, whether it’s a safe car to take you around, and the building that you spend all your time in, money gets all of it.

So how can people argue that it’s not critically important? And it’s also our identity as men is really wrapped up in this stuff, which is sad and is great and at the same time, but it’s a reality. How do you think about your

I’m trying to and look, it’s my ego. I’ll be I’ll be honest. My ego is pushing me to prove. I have something to prove. I have a chip on my shoulder. I have I have something to prove, and it’s that I can play the game of business at a very high level. Very high level. But I can also do those things. Be a good parent. Be a good dad. Stay physically fit. Maintain amazing relationships with people I love and know, and also have hobbies and other interests in life.

I don’t know very many well balanced people I’m trying to make that happen. Did you put that chip on your shoulder? Who did that? I preached it into existence with my Twitter, and it’s amplified because I’m out here preaching about it. It’s so weird how Twitter works, like, my tweets, most of my tweets are are just tweets directly to me. Like, they’re they’re reminders and advice to me. I am giving advice to myself on the internet, and it just so happens that 315,000 people have followed me, because they think it applies to them as well.

All this shit applies to me.

Yeah. It made me confident enough to take these big shots, and it gave me a competitive advantage in business. It gave me distribution. It gave me access to partners and talent, and it gave me a a network.

I think the average person networks all wrong. They just have the wrong mindset when it comes to networking. They have a mindset of when it comes to networking, how can you help me? And they walk around, they go to coffee, they go to meetups, they go to events, and they walk around with their handouts saying, me, me, me, me, help me, help help me, and what you have. If you’ve ever been to a college networking event, you have a bunch of people with absolutely nothing to offer anybody else walking around shaking hands saying, help me, help me, help help help help me, it’s ignorant.

It’s crazy. The way to build a network is to get really fucking good at something, period. End of story. As soon as you become an expert at something, and you prove to people that you know what you’re doing, whether it’s through making money that way, or doing something in this regard, or having something on your resume, when you prove to people that you are an expert in some field, then all of sudden, they can get something from you. They can gain, they can benefit from you, and that’s when your network explodes.

My network has exploded because I am a card in other people’s Rolodex. Think about it that way. As soon as you become a high value card in somebody else’s Rolodex, your network will explode. Your network will truly accelerate, and will truly be valuable when you have something to give other people. So so many people walk around their hand out, help me, help me, help me, when they should be forgetting about networking. They should build a business. They should get rich. They should learn how to operate.

They should learn self storage. They should learn venture capital. They should become an expert first, and then they should go out and build a network, and the same thing happens with social media. Everybody wants a social media following, everybody wants a lot of followers, everybody wants to be an influencer. Very few people are willing to do the freaking work to get really good at something, and make the money, and practice what they’re preaching, and and it it just doesn’t work.

I think that that’s a very encouraging, beautiful thing about life. And yes, I would agree with it. I think people could meet me, and I would let them down in so many ways, with my competence, with my ability, with the way my businesses are run. I think it’s a beautiful thing about life, and that you don’t have to be spectacular. You don’t have to be perfect to do amazing things. Like, that should be inspiring. It should be inspiring that the men that are at the top of the echelon of the most wealthy people in the world are are broken in some areas of life.

That’s inspiring to me. It makes me not feel that bad that I am broken in so many areas of my own life. Where are you most broken? I’m always trying to improve. Every area. I’m addicted to Twitter. I have to really fight this god complex that influencer status brings. Health, fitness. I have a lot of areas to improve there. My hobbies, I’m horrible at golf

I read a book called Entry Leadership by Dave Ramsey, and it wasn’t a book that’s super tactical, but it was a book about how he built his companies and how he thinks about dealing with people. And I think every single problem in this world is a people problem, and that had a massive influence on me.

business. Zuckerberg’s a stud. Why would you try to invent reinvent the wheel? Or Google. I have a lot of public equities, and they’re all a lot of money in public equities, and it’s all a thing, and it’s gonna stay that way, because those are the best companies in history of the world, and why would you try to reinvent the wheel? What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months? Well, the big one is that I previously thought that everybody should be an entrepreneur and a manager of people, and now I’m realizing that that’s just not the case, and most people are better off going to work for somebody.

I was extremely frugal, to the point where I would not make radical decisions about the cost benefit analysis of buying things for my family and my house and me, personally. So I’m replacing my wardrobe, I’m replacing my equipment, I’m replacing our vehicles, I’m replacing our mattresses, just all the shit that I cheaped out on that I that there actually is value in paying up a little bit. What are you most concerned about in the world today, Nick?

I think there’s a lot of really, really smart people who could build amazing companies if they started small and had a small goal, but instead, they get caught up in the hoopla of entrepreneurship culture on the Internet, and they’re trying to build massive unicorn venture capital backed companies, and I think it’s gonna burn out a lot of brilliant people, and they’re gonna end up going to get jobs instead of building wealth and and being their own boss and succeeding in entrepreneurship. What questions do you least wanna be asked in interviews?

The uncomfortable stuff is just the insecurities, and the fact that I started on third base, and I like people to think about me as a self made person, but I’m not a self made person, and that’s uncomfortable.

Yeah. I’m trying to figure out what company is the best business and requires that level of focus. I’m a very good gatherer of talent, and my plan right now is to gather talented people and let them do their thing with extreme levels of delegation, meaning I’m not that involved. So I’m trying to enable people and layer on the synergies around my brand and my distribution and my ability to attract talent, and get good operators, and just see what they can do. And some of them will win, some of them will lose, but I like my strategy so far.

But yeah, long term, it’ll be a power law for sure with what I’m doing.

I got some foot shoe inserts that changed the way I feel. Like, it makes my body less sore, and now they’re called Powerstep. They’re called Powerstep shoe inserts, they raised up the arch of my foot. I just feel a lot better when I’m

I wanna be on a mountain. It’s August, so early season hunt on a mountain with a bow in my hand and my 15 year old son in a tent with me.