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I feel like I could rule the world. I know, I could be what I want to travel. Never looking back. All right, it's question of the week time or one. We call it one question Friday. I like that. All right, one question Friday. Sam is traveling. So I got my boy been here. Been Levy. Not been the not producer, been not powerful. Producer been this has been Levy. The, the CEO of the milk Road and
My business partner across my fund and a bunch of other things. You guys hear me. Reference been a lot, but you don't know which been because I only deal with Ben's. So this is one of the bends. Bam. What's up, man? What's
going on? I'm Ridin High today, Chris. Paul and the sons one by like 25 last night. So I've never been
happier. This is true. All right. So let's let's do this one question. I think we have an audio clip, right? Let's play it this way. The audio clip. I haven't heard this yet. So let's see
what it is.
Hey guys, my name is Colin. I just had all of my nft stolen today. So my question is I'm sure you've been through something like it before, you know, when you get gut-punched like has that happened to you. What happened? And how did you work through
it man? I could feel the defeat. I can feel the pain in his voice there at the end that thank you. I was a soul crushed. Thank
Okay. So Colin you got your nft stolen. I you know I feel for you. That's no fun. I mean, that's a crime right? Somebody came and stole your property. It's digital property, but you know crime has been committed. So, you know there you got to kind of separate. Here's my kind of advice to have. I had somebody steal a bunch of my property before not really but you know, there's different flavors of gut punch and I've had I've had my share so here.
Is my kind of like formula for how to handle it? The first step is just be still and I mean this in kind of a Zen way, which is that look what's going to happen. If you know for the next 24-48 hours for you is you're going to your mind is going to go to a bunch of places. You're going to get angry. You're going to feel sad, you're going to feel upset at yourself. You can feel upset at others. You can feel upset at the fact that you can't get it back. So you're gonna hate crypto. You're going to get, you're going to feel a bunch of emotions by default. And what you want to do is you want to not
Just react you want to respond. So, what's the difference being of reaction and a response? A reaction is what you do, you know, sort of right away. It's an impulsive thing. And typically we don't love our reactions to things because our reactions are the things that are happening. In a more Primal way. Was that? Whereas our response is what happens when we pause for a second and we we choose how we're going to respond to every action is typically not something. You're choosing a response is something
Choosing and I this happens to me multiple times a day where I got to check my stuff. All right, am I reacting or responding here? And which one do I want to do? I know I can do both but I'd rather respond. And so the first thing is you got to be still, you got to distance yourself from it, emotionally first, then you got to say. All right. Well, how am I going to respond to this? Well, there's some like logistical steps. You might take, try to get it back report, it try to figure out who did it, you know, notify people in the community. So other people
don't fall for it, whatever the
scam was.
But then you gotta like, okay, let's say you've done the logistics part and maybe there is no happy ending where you didn't just all turn out, right? That's where you got it. What I call you got to decide what story is true. So in any event anything that happens, there are. There are multiple stories, but the to simplify all say there's two stories, anytime something happens. There's the story, that'll make you feel bad. And there's the story, that'll make you feel good. They're both stories, right? And they both have truth to them, but it's just a matter of, which
Which angle you're looking at something as you got to decide, which story am I going to roll with? Am I going to roll with the version of this? That makes me feel really bad, or am I going to roll with the version of this? That makes me feel good. And I know that probably sounds hard in the moment. You just got a bunch of your shit stolen and you know, which is why we first, you know, trying to distance ourselves from it, but that's where you're going to have to go. You're going to have to decide the version of the story. That's going to make you feel good. Right? Imagine a breakup. Most people, when they have a break up in a relationship. They feel bad.
And they choose a story that's going to make them feel worse, which is my God. All those years. We spent together is time wasted. I'm not good enough or she's not good enough for whatever. The reasons are. Right? We have, we come up with a story that makes us feel bad or we come up with a story that makes us feel good, which is man. Now I know what I really want. Now, I'm ready for the right person, you know, you want to walk out into the street and just look left and right and say, you know next you know, I'm ready. And so there's a version of the story that will make you feel good or bad in any given situation. The power is in being able to
To choose what the story is and not just having the default one put on you. So that's my like, mentality mindset ramp. And what do you think you? You've had your fair of gut-punch? Just have you ever had something like this?
Yeah. I mean in crypto, I think like a year ago. I had like a few eith stolen out of my wallet and I was crushed and I think I actually called you and I was like, dude. It sucks. I just lost a few eat because I stupidly clicked on a Discord scam and I think what you said was that's the price of admission every single person in crypto has had that happen. And that's just what that's just the name of the
Game, so I don't know. My perspective on it is like yeah, definitely been got punched a ton and crypto and I also feel like every crypto and I've ever gotten. I'm mad that I didn't sell it at the right time or I held too long or bought too late. I think that's the name of volatility to. So, I'm just, like, that's didn't, you know, I'm gonna get a huge home run because I play this game and yeah, learn from my
mistakes. Yeah. There's also like a this phrase with investing, which is, I've never done. I've never done an investment, right?
Which means on an investment that worked out. I should have always been earlier and bet more and on an investor that is wrong. I shouldn't have better. I, you know, I was too late or whatever. And so you've never, ever on any investment feel like you did it, right? You'll always be kind of kicking yourself wishing you had done it either been bigger or better earlier, whatever on it. And so, I think the thing you said, that's right, which is it's the nature of the game. And so, you know, crypto and of tease, this is the Wild Wild West right now. There's a reason your nft can go up and
10x and price and one month or 100x and price in a year are like, you know, I don't know how much board apes are were, but like I think a year ago, they were under one eith each and now they're like whatever 140 or something like that. So you don't hundred and forty X in a year. So one of the reasons you can get these types of games is because it's a wild wild west. But what comes with the Wild Wild West is that, dude? It's, it's not safe. There are places where you can stub your toe and me. And Sam I think said this on a pod once which was
If you become an entrepreneur or an investor.
And then every time things go anytime, disaster, strikes or things go poorly or things go down. You're like emotionally a wreck because of it. And I'm not saying calling as, but it's very easy to become close to an emotional wreck when things go down. It's like, you signed up to go, you waited in line to go on a roller coaster and you strap yourself in. And then the roller coaster went up and down, and every time it went down. You were like, I like, oh my God, I can't believe this, like, get me off this thing. It's like, dude. Why did you get on a roller coaster?
Hey, you know, like if you choose entrepreneurship, you choose investing. If you choose investing you gotta wake up and like the last four months, dude, I've lost millions of dollars just because I wake up and every day is red stocks. Our red group do is read. Everything's red. I haven't seen green and months, dude. I don't even see the color green. Right? Like, I'm starting to text people on Android just so I could see the green speech bubble, dude. Like I just want to see green and but that's the reality is like, I signed up to be an investor. What did I think? It's always going to go up. That's like I signed up to, you know, do this crazy crypto stuff like yeah.
This crazy shit. Where, you know, I'm playing this, this game, where your self sovereign, individual your custody in your own assets. Well, there's going to be times where you didn't custody it very well and it got stolen. And so, you know, same thing with with being an entrepreneur is you got to ask yourself. Am I just complaining that the roller coaster? Went up and down? And that's a way to not. Let yourself be a victim. I think one of the most positive traits, somebody can have is that they never let themselves.
Be a victim. No matter what happens in their life. They view themselves as the person in control and the root cause of whatever has occurred and in doing set. So they give themselves the power to make things good and they give themselves the accountability when things go bad. And so so, you know, I think that's a just a decision. You got to make up front. Am I going to let myself ever play victim and look for kind of pity self-pity or pity from others or you just take that off the table? You say? No, I'm never.
Going to play that game and so that means on days or my shit gets stolen. It didn't somebody didn't steal my FTS. I let my nft s be stolen and you, right? So you take control over what happened and it hurts in those moments, but that decision to never play victim is like one that pays off, you know in Spades, you know for the rest of your life. Ben. What did I miss?
Also? It's a great opportunity for a Twitter thread. Right here. How I got my n of T stolen.
Yeah. This is the greates. This is the beginning of every great story. Right? I've
Had this many times where I get a cease-and-desist letter. And then we turned it into marketing for our company. I've had it where, you know, Google or Facebook will launch a clone of our app and your investors will send you a link and be like, hey, did you see this thing? Yeah, motherfucker. I saw it. Like, I saw that Facebook has cloned our app, you know, pixel by pixel. And that you know this, you know, 500 billion dollar company is now competing with us. Yes, I saw the news but you know, you got to sort of like in that moment. It's like, this is our chance. This is our story. Of course, they're going to copy us.
Onto
something, right? Of course, they're going to copy us. Pixel for Pixel because we have the right solution. Right? And you have to decide what story you're going to tell yourself and your team and your the people around you. So that again you're going to feel some kind of way. Would you rather feel bad or feel good? That's all you got to choose. I tell Bend this all the time. What Bend started this off? Time about the sun's winning and Ben. How do you feel when the Suns win? Amazing? Been? How do you feel when the sun's lose?
Pretty pretty down on myself. Write down everything.
So you ride the roller coaster?
And you let yourself feel bad and so, you know, that's a choice you're making right now. At some point you might decide to play the game differently, which is I'm going to, is it possible to feel great when your team wins and not feel shitty when your team loses? Yes, that is possible. It sounds like it sounds like it's breaking the rules. But like that's what you do when you're like a Lifehacker. He's like, yeah, you break the rules. Like, I'm gonna play the game. I'm gonna play the game on my terms. And and so there is a version of
that and like when your business is have issues. I think one of the business have issues like
Don't let it get you down at all and you're able to take the winds in stride really?
Well, do you have an example of that, like something where we've taken what we? We've had a situation where other people would have felt down, but we spun it too. Has anything come to
mind. I mean, I think we're in one right now, right? Like we send the milk Road and we've had some deliverability issues recently where the open rates have dropped a little bit and we can't really tell, you know, we're trying to figure out why and I think there's one version where you freak out about that and you make it ruin your week or ruin your day and there's
another version where you just take it in stride and know you're going to figure it
out. Yeah, like, you know, you fast forward a year from now. This will be a forgotten footnote on the overall story and even when things are really crazy and, you know, something really bad happens. Like, you know, in my e-commerce business, our entire shipment for Christmas, got seized and flagged, and then inspected. And then we had to do a recall and I all this stuff and the people, you know, people on my team were all like, oh my God, like just for this, you know, one eighth of an inch.
You know, this random random seizure for no reason just because of random inspection then went on one item. They found a 1/8 of an inch discrepancy. Oh my God, this is so unfair. This is so bad. Blah blah blah. And it's like, all right, like dude look like it, you know, we and I created a channel in our slack called highs and lows. I said, let's put them here. Let's let's document the highs and lows and I think every startup should do this. Honestly is document the highs and lows because it'll just get you used to being like when you go in there, when things feel really bad and you want to
Go in there and write it down and you it's like, you see the last 16 months ago and you're like, oh, yeah, that felt pretty bad too. But I've like, I've totally forgotten that our business has grown to X since then, and like, oh, you know, just the way that, that one turned out to be nothing. This one's gonna be nothing to. I'm going to eat this and I'm going to like use this as an opportunity to learn like, oh shit. We didn't even know these that's one. Eighth of an inch rule. We had to go like, you know, change the measurements of something. Like I'm glad we knew now versus when it's bigger, right? I'm glad this happened because that's
The lead to all these good things. And so, you know, there's we had an example like this where like, I'll give you another one with our e-commerce business. The warehouse manners that we had hired turn. It wasn't working out. Then we found out they were trying to like, you know, sort of like, copy our business in a way, like, launch a competitor or something like that because, you know, they're in the warehouse, they see business is going great. So they wanted a piece of the action and this is a moment where our team was sort of like, you know, immediately felt betrayed and then upset and was
Like, well, you know, what should we do? Should we change? You know, should be, we're going to make a change. It's going to be so hard. And those are the moments where you need to show the most poised, right? That's when that's when strength matters, is when things get hard, things are easy, is not what strength matters. So it's like, oh dude, I've been training for this. I've been training for these types of moments. Finally, got a reason to use these muscles in that are that are in my body to be able to be strong here. And so it was all about Poise. It was all about basically coming up with. All right.
First be still, let's not overreact second. Let's decide how we're going to approach this and respond to the situation, not react. And then in that response, it turned out. Where actually we ended up finding this amazing manager and we ended up saving all this money. Now, we couldn't have seen that upfront in the moment. I felt bad. Now, three months later or two months later, whatever. It's like, oh dude, we found this thing. That's saving us, you know, $2 per order which is going to add up to be hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra profit saved because we found this new manager who found this.
This new process who found this new thing and we would have never done that had that disaster. Not struck, you know, as a leader, you're always on the lookout to arm yourself with knowledge, the books and seminars to podcast to help you make the best decisions for you and your customers. Because when you do more more good can grow with HubSpot CRM platform, you can track store manage and report all the tasks and activities that make up your relationships with your customers. That gives you a bird's eye view over your customers interactions and HubSpot. Empowers your decision-making like never before. So, you can grow
Your business, your customers and give them all that. You've got learn how you can grow better at HubSpot.com.
And so once you go through life enough time, you have enough experience. You realize oh, it's all working for me. Not against me. And once you decide it's all working for me. Not against me. Then the next time the disaster strikes like alright, cool. What's this? How is this working for me? And you don't panic and other people around you're like, man. How's this person? Never Panic. They never freaked out about this stuff that and then that becomes the culture of the company. That's where you want to be.
Ironically. I'm good at that and everything except when it comes to the Phoenix Suns.
Basketball. Yeah. Well, that's cause you're fit. You're mentally fit.
It's like, you know, you're mentally fit with your upper body is you never do leg day, right? So it's like everybody's got something in the gym wear. They're really strong at it. It's easy for them. It's hard for others and then they have something that's easy for others, hard for them. And that might be a calf raises that might be whatever. And so like, you know, you can take a bodybuilder but you go put them in a pilates class and they're struggling because they don't have the flexibility or the maybe the core strength of coordination to be able to do some some movements. And so everybody's got these moments that are these situations that are hard for them. Like Ben
Will, so I'm curious for you. What's the thing? Give me yours. What's the adversities disaster strike situation, where you're pretty good, and then what's the adversity or disaster strike situation? Where you're pretty weak. What's your version of like day?
I'm actually like, because I'm a pretty relaxed person. I tend to do pretty well with adversity but like personal attacks, really get to me like like bad things happening in the world.
Um, don't bother me, bad things for other
people, don't care for me, really care.
You can have like, if it hurts my bank account even or like whatever. Like I just kind of I move on with life, but if someone says something bad about my character or yeah, insults me, or something like that. The one I think of that, I think I dealt with pretty well. Was I was in Barcelona and it relates to what this guy was talking about and
I'm sitting there at like a like a cafe. So imagine Cafe. I'm on La rambla, which is like a walking Street. And so I'm facing this big street with a lot of people and I'm eating dinner. And I've got my phone on the table and I'm reading my phone as I eat dinner. And this old woman comes up to me and sticks a sign in my face and starts asking for money, but the weird thing is I speak Spanish and she's not speaking Spanish and I had. So I
What she says, she's got to sign right in my face and she's she's speaking it clearly asking for money, but I can't tell what she's saying and I was like, what? I don't understand you and she keeps saying something, go go away. I try and kind of show her off. She leaves. I'm kind of shaking up and after like a couple seconds, reorienting myself, I go back to my dinner. Really? Yeah, that's stuck. The sign in my face, and underneath it had taken my phone from off the table and I run off and go search for her. And of course, even if I'd found her, she'd probably handed it off to someone else.
Else and the phone was gone. And and that is the kind of thing that I actually like deal with. Okay, like obviously freaked out for a couple minutes. I was really mad. I was doing but eventually I was I just kind of like was like, okay. I'm okay. It was always hard to explain like I was speaking I could I didn't have a phone in a foreign country and is like scary but I was like, I'm okay. I've got all my fingers and toes and it was like actually a good opportunity to kind of like re-evaluate of like, all right. This is going to mess.
A lot of stuff but all the things that actually matter in my life are not affected by this Dom being gone,
right? I'm going to also give a technique because one one part of the philosophy and others is a simple technique you can do. So, how do you actually be still, how do you actually get to the response? Not the thing and its really annoying when bad things happen. And then the advice you're getting is like, it's okay. Don't worry about it. You shake it off, you know, because it's like, know, in the moment. I feel, I feel bad. I feel some sense of loss, you know, and so
Oh, it's very hard. And so the actual technique here is a Tony Robbins technique that he calls the 90 seconds of suffering and the story is Tony goes to India and he's like, he's taking, he's taking his Platinum Partners. And these are the dudes who is like, you go to the beginner. Tony Robbins event. You're like, oh my God, this guy's the Messiah and so you're like, oh I pay 25k a year. I get to go on a trip with Tony and like I get to be a platinum partner and so you pay maybe it's even more than a hundred care. Some like that. You pay some crazy amount of money and you become a platinum partner. So he took his Platinum Card.
To India to some like, ashram in the mountains and he's like, you know, just giving them a unique experience and he goes in this like kind of Guru guy in the mountains, as like, mr. Tony Robbins, you know, blah blah. And he's like, he's like, how are you, is I got fantastic, you know, life is amazing. I feel so grateful saying all the Tony Robbins things in his like monster voice and then they're like the guy was like, you know, said something like, you know, but how, you know, he said,
So, how are you dealing with your suffering? And he's like, he's like suffering, like the hell you talking about, bro. Like I'm Tony Robbins. I'm not suffering. I'm mr. Positivity. I got my Platinum Partners here. We're in India. I'm I'm teaching, I'm not suffering. They might be suffering. I'm not suffering. And he's like, but I just saw you, a moment ago, you know, your whatever your employee was saying about the thing, they forgot and you got so upset. You were telling them how they should do it differently. And you, you totally changed your face.
He's like, oh, well, you know, that was just, we have this. I want this trip to be great for our partners. And, you know, this person dropped the ball and yeah, I guess I kind of lost my cool. But, you know, I really care about Bubba. He's like, they caught himself. He's like, okay, I'm just justifying. He's like, he's like that's not suffering though. Suffering is like, you know, look around in India. You see people suffering on the streets and he's like, he's like, it's the same thing. They have a deep different cause but they feel the same thing. They feel suffering in a moment, right? And see he goes, he goes, you know you, he's like, you
Or Tony Robbins. I see you now on, you're you're you're bright and you're happy. You're lit up your energetic. You've got the, you have your charisma, all the stuff. He's like, don't make your happiness. So cheap. Tony Robbins and he told him and he was like, happiness cheap, but he mean, he goes that Amy's like that guy just did this small thing and your happiness. He took her happiness. So your happiness had a very low price it only took a very small thing to acquire your happiness. He took it away from you. And so what you want to do.
And as a might take away from this was like you want to have this like you want to be the Louis Vuitton of happiness. You want your happiness to be very expensive, that it takes a very, very big event, even bigger than all your entities gets, stolen for somebody that's something to take it away. So you have to decide the price of your happiness. Is your happiness going to go away. If someone gives you a wrong look or Cuts you off in traffic or your delivery, gets your pizza delivery on door Dash gets delayed. Are you going to get upset and it not upset in a big way but like you lose that. Joyful State of Mind you could otherwise be in.
So, he gave himself this thing, Tony came up with this technique called 90 seconds of suffering, he goes. Okay, so I started to notice these little moments where I would lose my State lose, my state of mind where I wasn't, I was no longer in that kind of happy grateful, you know, optimistic enthusiastic state of mind, he S. I would just decide. All right. I can't prevent feeling that feeling like it's very hard to just prevent it, but I can contain it. And so he's like, I'm going to give myself 90 seconds to suffer and after the 90 seconds, I gotta let it go.
But I get 90 seconds to let to attend to do it. And of course, what happens is like, you know, if you don't give if you don't time box, it is very easy to like have something ruin your day or even kind of get you down for a week or a month or a year and you're depressed all of a sudden. So timeboxing is valuable. But but the funny thing is, if you do the 90 seconds of suffering, we all right. This shit happened. I'm going to give myself 90 seconds with in like 24 seconds. You'll be like, all right, whatever. I don't even need to do the whole 90. Like it's not like I know it's going to end anyways in
Do I really need to sit here and wait the 92 feel bad, like if it's going to end in 90 seconds anyway, so you don't even you end up not even doing 30 and so that technique of like, giving yourself 90 seconds of suffering, whenever whatever happens has been like pretty game changing for me. It's so, you know, I'd encourage you to do that. Alright? And if he's got stolen, all right, have at it. 90 seconds to suffer suffer fully, and as much as you want for 90 seconds, but the agreement is, at the end of that, 90 you no longer get to get to suffer about this. At the night of the 90, you can take a deep breath and going to
The story in your head about what's making you feel bad because it's not that your entities got stolen. It's some story about that. It's how much money you've lost? How you're not going to get them back. How you spent so long collecting them? How that was your favorite one. That story is what's making you feel bad. And that. Now, after 90 seconds, you got to change that story. So that's my advice for one question, Friday.
That's it. Peace
out.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it. Like a Days on the Road Less Traveled never looking back.
