is start now!
Over to you Jocko Willink.
(rooster crows)
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Espresso keep me going
♫ I wake up every morning
– People want to know how to stop the laziness and how
to stop the procrastination
and they have some idea in
their head, you know,
some kind of vision of what they want to do.
But they don’t know where to start,
they don’t know where to start it.
You know, they don’t know where to start.
And instead they say hey, where do I start?
And when’s the best time to start?
And I have a very simple answer for that.
Here and now!
That’s it.
You want to improve? You want to get better?
You want to get on a workout program or a clean diet?
You want to start a business?
You want to write a book or make a movie?
Or build a house or a computer or put together
some mobile application?
Where do you start?
You start right here.
And when do you start? You start right now.
You initiate the action aggressively, you go!
‘Cause the idea
isn’t going to execute itself
and the book isn’t going to write itself, and the
weights out in the gym they’re not going to move themselves.
You have to do it and you have to do it now.
And that means you got to stop thinking about it,
and stop dreaming about it and stop researching every
aspect of it and reading all about it, and debating the
pros and cons of it.
Just start doing it.
Take that first step!
And make it happen.
Get after it!
And get after it here and now!
– There is no perfect first step.
There is no perfect plan.
There is no perfect time to get started,
a lot of people are so held up.
I’m finding what the perfect first thing is to do,
that they do nothing!
And that’s the ultimate failure.
The ultimate failure is doing nothing and just sitting on
this idea and never taking any kind of action for it
because you’re worried about making a misstep.
You’re worried about making a mistake,
you’re worried that it’s not perfect.
Your perfectionism is killing you, is preventing you
from doing amazing things in your life and with a business.
You take any step, you have a vision, here’s what I
want to accomplish, here’s my goal, I want to write a
book, I want to start a company, whatever it is,
whatever first step comes to mind, go out and do that.
And then adjust, adjust, adjust, adjust.
You can have the best plan in the world, right, and I’m
all for business planning.
It’s not just I’m going to throw an idea out there and
see what happens.
Right, you can plan, you can model success,
you can look at what has worked for people.
But you have to go out and do it.
‘Cause the best plan is obsolete as soon as you
start executing on it.
This is what almost killed my first business.
This is how I learned the lesson,
because I was that guy, I was the perfectionist,
I didn’t want to do anything till I had it all figured out.
And you only later realize, what you think you
had figured out, you have no idea what you’re talking about
because you haven’t gone out and done anything yet.
I lost a 40 million dollar deal in my first company.
I was making three hundred dollars a month sucking in
my company, turned it around.
Started making an income and had an opportunity
to sell my business for 40 million dollars
and I lost it to my biggest competitor,
Because I had to have the perfect plan.
‘Cause I spent an entire summer working on the
perfect plan and I was too late to the table.
I was looking the wrong way.
What made great sense on paper, wasn’t actually
what was going to happen in the market.
And I lost a 40 million dollar deal because of it.
That kills, that sucks.
I was 22 years old.
It’s important to plan, but you need to do.
And don’t get so hung up on having the perfect step,
don’t worry what the first step is.
People write in and say what’s my first step, it doesn’t
matter, something.
Do something and then do something again tomorrow
and do something again the next day.
And every day you get a little bit better.
Start taking massive action.
That’s how you’re going to get that idea out of your head,
finally, and out into the world so you can start
reaping the benefits and having a big impact on this world
like you were meant to do.
So the question today is I’m curious,
What are you afraid to start now,
that you are going to as a result of watching this video?
Leave it down in the comments below, I’m really
curious to find out.
I also want to give a quick shout out
to Onyema Iriaka, that you so much for picking up
a copy of my book.
Your one word really, really, really means a lot to me.
And I hope you’re enjoying the read.
Thank you guys again for watching.
I believe in you, I hope you continue
to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is,
and I’ll see you again tomorrow morning
for another shot of N Spresso.
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Espresso keep me going
(typewriter keys click)
– I love when people–
I love, my assistant’s got a great thing now on this,
once in every four months someone sends an email saying,
I’ve got a huge startup I want you to invest in
but you’ve got to sign this NDA.
Right, which literally every time gets an email back that
says you.
Right.
And the reason is, I’m a humongous believer that
ideas are shit and that execution’s the game.
Right. We’ve all got ideas.
Everybody’s got ideas, do you know how many
ideas we all have here.
We can probably sit here for the next two hours,
draw them all out, record them and predict the next
seventy eight great startups over the next nine years.
And so I think the thing that is another theme
in entrepreneurship is there is way too much fodder
brought to the idea.
Uber was Magic Cab three years earlier.
Uber is not an idea.
Uber existed, it was called Magic Cab.
But the guys that executed it, sucked.
So they lost.
So I think, you know,
if there’s any level of romance left in this room
about your idea, I’d like to suffocate it.
Because I think the actual situation is what
you actually do with it.
– As a musician you want to be great,
like you wannna be good.
And you sort of set these funny expectations
for yourself you know.
One of the funniest things that Fogarty ever said to me
he was like, “Yeah, I tried to learn, I was learning to
play the drums, but I realized that I would never be as good
as John Bonham from Led Zeppelin so I stopped.
And I’m like, who is as good as John Bonham?
Nobody.
I mean, what the fuck, how could you do that?
So, like there should be no right or wrong, you know.
You should just be cool with what you do and how you sound.
Like, it’s one of the things, I have a problem with, like,
a lot of the song contest shows on TV.
Not only because, you know, whatever it’s corporate cheese.
Or whatever the fuck.
But I have a problem with like if my kid walked up
on stage and sang her heart out as best as she could
and Jennifer Lopez said like,
“No, sorry, that’s not good enough.”
I’d be like. (crowd yells)
Ah, Ah, Ah
I’d be so pissed you know, ’cause that’s not how it works.
You know, you should go to a yard sale
and buy a shi old
guitar and then go find a friend and get into your garage
and just suck.
They’d be awful and then write some songs and become the
biggest band in the world, you know
‘Cause that’s how it works.
I mean it works other ways too I’m sure,
but I mean
as a young musician, first of all
you’re not going to make a living doing it.
Like, accept that, realize that.
Because then if you do, you’re stoked!
The reward of playing music, playing music should be
the reward of playing music, that’s what you kind of get.
Like when I was a little kid, right I was playing punk
rock music as a teenager.
There was never any career opportunity cause we played
punk rock music, nobody wanted to buy that.
But we loved to do it, it was so much fun.
And, like if you start from a place like that.
That you just love to create, that you just love to
play music and you can’t stop thinking about it
and you do it every day and you do it by yourself or
you do it with your friends and that’s enough
for you to survive the rest of your life. (audience yells)
That’s great!
Then once you start getting good, you start playing for
people and once you start playing for people,
if you’re good, then those people will tell other people,
that girl’s really good.
So then all of a sudden you’re playing to all these
different people and that to me is the most important thing.
When it’s you on stage and people are seeing.
When people see another person doing that it’s
really inspiring, like it’s cool to see a human being
jamming, that’s great!
– I was a very headstrong young person
and by 1983 or four,
had started my own publishing company
to publish my own books, realizing that no one else
will publish me and I was right about that.
And so my first book, I saved my food money from Black
Flag, a little here, a little there.
And I saved enough to make a fold and staple book.
I couldn’t type so I hand wrote out the things
and I made a dummy that I could off set print,
fold and staple.
And I sold them for two dollars, mainly gave them away,
but I sold enough and they blew out, 500 just went.
And then I took that money to make another print run of that
and from that money I made my first paperback and
33 years later,
that’s a fully staffed company with
books in translation and hard cover editions
and the whole nine yards.
But it started with I’m going to do my thing, I’ll be
City Lights junior without the talent
and I did that at the same time I was doing
my first spoken word gigs.
And why did I have the gumption and audacity to start
my own book company?
Because I come from punk rock.
I come from watching Ian MacKaye invent Dischord Records
on his Mom’s kitchen table.
I come from folding and gluing picture sleeves together.
Black Flag had their own label of course you do it yourself.
You want to make a book?
Sit down and write it then go to the printing place.
Where’s a printer?
Get in the phone book and find a printer.
We make records, make some books.
You just do it.
It’s like you don’t even think about it,
you just do it.
I’m sure that that writing is just awful, but I did it.
And without even hesitation I’m making my own book
company, stop me.
I dare you, I never thought about it twice.
Just because DIY man, like let your voice be heard.
”
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