Episode Transcript.

What’s up, guys, welcome back to THE a.m.

So today I actually want to talk about risk, and before I even get into risk, let me talk to you guys about this. No matter what you do in life, you need courage to do whatever you’re about to do. I think there’s a misnomer of where we believe that life is not risky, and we believe we’re safe, and that’s wrong, because life is ever changing.

So for instance, talking to a friend, talking to her about her job, and I told her several years ago, like, Hey, listen, your whole department is pretty much going to go away, and you need to work to be promoted. And you think you’re safe, you think you’re safe. So either you need to work to be promoted or work to get another job elsewhere, because this is just how life works, and your whole job, pretty much, your whole department, and where you’re at, and even your job position right now is going to go away. So she worked, and she listened, and she worked to be promoted, and then lo and behold, they outsourced her whole department to some place cheaper, and the whole department ‘s gone. The whole team, pretty much, is gone, except for the leadership. And she worked get promoted. And when she got promoted, it put her in just enough a safe place to escape that.

now, why am I saying this? She was in a comfortable job. It didn’t look like anything was going to change. There are no signs, there are zero signs of danger. Okay, however, stagnation is super risky. When you are just comfortable and you’re staying the same the course and you’re not learning to grow and change. That’s super risky, because guess what Is being forced on you without your consent and outside of your control? Change, because there’s lots of people driving change in society, economically, culturally, right? Worldwide, locally, as large and as small as you want to get, there are other people out there driving change.

And so if you are unwilling to change, you’re really in a risky position. And I’m saying this to help put into perspective that cool risk to begin something new is no greater than just staying the course and staying the same. And I really believe, like Courage oftentimes to do the things that we need to do is lost. Like having the courage in our hearts and having the courage and the fortitude to move forward into the unknown is so needed in life, in life in general, having the courage to do what you need to do.

And for instance, like cool, you’re going to have children. You never had children before. You need courage to move through that. Right? You’re going to get married, you’ve never been married before. You’re going to need courage to move through that. And I have always, personally believed that I can do this. It’s a problem in in a lot of ways, but it’s been good in a lot of other ways, too, and it’s helped really bring about a lot of things in my life. Without looking at cool, there’s deep risk.

Like when Andrew and I started company, I told him, I was like, Hey bro, like, we may fail, but there’s no way that we’re not going to win. And we talked about that a lot, and it’s interesting, because that same thing applies to you, and if you are looking to start a business, you want to do something different, like, there’s ways to mitigate risk. You got to think through it. Like, I’ve been really big on critical thinking lately, and I’ve mentioned in several episodes, but you can think through how you’re going to mitigate risk.

So let me give you an example. I want to start my own business. Awesome. You can work through a little plan. How much do you need to live for a year? Give yourself a year’s worth of buffer, because you’ll need it. Start saving up. Okay? And let me start small. I’m going to continue to work my job, and I’ll work hard on the weekends to do whatever I want to do, and build, and I’ll come home at night and build. That’s what I did. I worked a job, and then worked nights as well. And the job was not easy. We worked long days. We were working like 12,13, sometimes 14 hour days, even more than that. And then I come home, and then I would do what I need to do to get the skills under me and to begin building out what I need to build out with Andrew.

Now, there are things I totally do differently today, knowing what I know now, however, you can have a same plan to move through things, right? Oh, cool. Let me actually see if this works. Let me test the waters. Let me just ship things. And here’s the thing you need, speed between idea and implementation. So cool. I’ve got this idea. Let me see if it works. Okay, cool. Put together your plan, and then just test it and see if it works or not. See if it fails. Cool. If it fails, cool. You haven’t lost anything. You still got your job. It’s why you’re doing things on the side, right.

And so you can put together plans to mitigate risk, and just know that it is risky to stay the same. It is just as risky, if not more. If you notice society really celebrates and really actually celebrates. Change and invention, and it really celebrates forward momentum. Look at all of history, from where we’ve gone to, especially the 1900s look at from the 1900s to today. It is all about change, and it is happening faster now than ever, because of artificial intelligence and because of the technology that’s coming out. It’s crazy.

But the point is, is this staying the same is, in my opinion, way more risky than actually being bold and having some courage to go do something that you actually want to do.

Anyways, guys, I’ll catch you later. Peace.