Episode Transcript

What’s up, what’s up, what’s up. Everybody, welcome back to THE a.m guys, I’m still hoarse, still fighting off the crud. That’s how it is.

Anyways guys, I want to talk about a quote I heard from Jeff Bezos recently, and I actually heard it several years ago, and it is such a good question to ask, and I want to talk about it because one of my personal struggles in business has always been thinking about what is going to change. What is going to change? How are the industries changing? How are the technology’s changing, what’s changing in culture, society, people all this, right? And then, how do I build against that? How do I make strategies, and how do we build and create to invest long term that protects against those things?

And the quote from that from Jeff Bezos, and what he said was this, he asked himself a question, what is not going to change in the next 10 years? And then build predicated on that, and that actually really helped narrow down what I was going through. So what I was going through was very broad. So to give you an example of this, I talked to Andrew 10 years ago. I was like, man, AI is coming. Nobody ever talked about AI. I was nuts for talking about it back then, I wish I had a podcast, then you would have heard me. I could actually click you the date and listen to me click you the date. I’m talking about our internal tools. I could actually, you know, mark the date and be like, hey, look this one. I said it.

But anyways, Andrew and the other team member we had at the time are my witnesses. I talked about AI, and I talked about AI taking our jobs, and how do we build predicated against that? How do we build predicated on all this technology that’s coming out? And lo and behold, we’re here. And so there wasn’t just artificial intelligence I was talking about. Then there was a lot of other things, a very broad spectrum of things, and that’s kind of how I’m built. I see a lot of things broadly, and I see a lot of large pieces, and I see how things shift and work and move in society, different stuff.

But the point of what I’m saying is there’s so much information to go through that when Jeff Bezos said this quote and really changed my life in a lot of ways, and how I thought and saw because instead of just sitting down and being like, Okay, let me make this never ending list of things that are constantly changing in the next 10 years. It is, oh, let me make a list of things that won’t change in the next 10 years and build on that. And then I can come and revisit that list and add or subtract to it as five years go by. Four years go by three years go by two years, whatever it is. And I can continue to add and subtract from that list. And now the variation of change and the fluxation within that list is so small and it may not be anything at all, it radically allows a lot of things to go through and to actually be processed out and built properly.

Because what happens is, is when you’re just constantly looking and looking up and being like, Oh, what about this? What about this? And your focus is outside of what you need to be building. It stunts growth. I’ve done this, and I’m I’m repeating mistakes to you that I made personally as a leader, and personally in building a business to where you’re looking at a lot of other things. And it’s like, Man, if I just kept my head down, focused on what I knew wasn’t going to change, it would have radically changed a lot of stuff in the company quicker. It would have helped a lot of things.

Andrew and I talk about it, and he calls it building a new train. He’s like, yep, we get up, we build a new train, and then, you know, we start putting the engine together, do all this and that, and then the next thing, you know, we got to build another one, another one. But it’s we never use those new trains because we’re either too early or too late. Versus if we actually built trains predicated on what wasn’t going to change, they would all be useful. And it’s really true, all those trains would be really true. And so there has been a lot of ways to work on my side. It’s been great learning experience, right? But then at the same time cool, it would have also been great learning experience if we won on the other side as well.

That brings me to just a little tidbit. By the way, cool if you experience failure, failure itself is not wasted, as long as you’re choosing to learn from it. The moment that you fail and the moment that failure is wasted is when you no longer choose to learn and improve and grow from that failure.

So all that being said is, if you’re thinking about moving forward, you’re thinking about choosing a career, right? You’re thinking about moving forward, especially in this day and age where technology is changing so fast, like you think about where we’ve come right? We’ve come from bows and arrows and wood and spears now space and we have SpaceX and all these other things like it’s crazy now, and it’s only going to get faster.

Build a list of what’s not going to change within the next 10 years, what are people going to need within the next 10 years, and what is always going to be needed, and then find something there career, business, whatever it’s going to be.

Anyways, guys, I’m out of time, so I’ll catch you later. Peace.