You created a set of seven principles to give your life a new trajectory, to get out of those sideways years. Of those principles, which one had the greatest impact on your life?
[The principle] "Give to be rich" has had the most impact on me, because nothing sets you in a forward motion more than generosity. What generosity does is it focuses the mind on what you have, and not what you lack. Generosity forces that kind of thinking, because you'll typically never give to someone who's got more than you. So when you're being a mentor to somebody who's struggling at work or in a transition period and you see that you helped to move the needle, it helps you realize how insignificant your problems are.
The other thing generosity does at a more physical level is it triggers the reward center in your brain, which releases a variety of chemicals. When you help and you realize you're helping, it creates a chemical reaction which would unload things like dopamine and endorphins and serotonins. The most important thing that happens is your body will release a hormone called oxytosin. Oxytosin is known as the bonding hormone: It changes your point of view about people a little bit, and it makes you much more sympathetic and emphatic.
For entrepreneurs, this is important. Your ability to bond with your customers, bond with your start-up employees, and trust them is the key to everything, because you can't scale, if you can't trust. You can't scale a consumer business if you don't trust consumers to give back more than you give them—ask Tony Hsieh at Zappos, incredible level of trust he has. You can't create a great place to work like Herb Kelleher and Colleen Barrett did at Southwest [Airlines] if you don't trust your people enough to say, "The customer is not always right." Trust is difficult to create, but I have seen in the best entrepreneur circles that the most trusting are always the most giving. There's just something about helping other people that causes you to realize that all people are good.
How can you adopt this generous attitude even if you don't have a "full cup" to work with?
Everybody's got something they can give. Go back to 1998, I'm working for Mark Cuban at what was called AudioNet, making $30,000 a year with no net value, living in an apartment—what did I have to give, right? The first thing I did was I stockpiled knowledge. I became the second most voracious reader I knew besides Mark, and I leveraged what little reputation we had to get access to a mastermind group of writers—like early guys at Wired and Fast Company—and other business executives and traditional real world people who mentored me, like Stanley Marcus Jr. from Neimann Marcus. In just a few years, I got a pretty good stockpile of specialized knowledge about the nature of the Internet economy. That opened doors for me, because as they began to redistribute it, I made friends. I leveraged that information from local giants to global giants, and they all reciprocated greatly by handing me great information in return, talking about me in the space, helping me make more introductions, or, in the case of Sony, doing a $20 million deal with Yahoo! [in 2002] at a time where we really needed the cash. I was really able to leverage knowledge sharing, and I think anybody can. It's the great first step.
I want an entrepreneur to think that every time you have an opportunity to either educate, mentor, or network someone who's got less than you but the same desire, you should consider yourself mastering your mind. Henry Ford once said that was really the secret to his success, is that he conquered his mind. One of the greatest ways you conquer your mind is by giving, because you release things that don't own you anymore—[André] Gide, the French philosopher, always said, "That which you can't release, it possesses you." I always encourage people to stockpile stuff just so you can give it away, and that you should spend prospecting time every week trying to find good opportunities and be aggressive about it. It's not a social responsibility; it's a social opportunity.
Let's talk about one of the most interesting principles you share in your book, about feeding your mind "good stuff." Why is it important to monitor what we feed our minds?
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day for your metabolism because it informs the body what to do with the stuff you put in it for the rest of the day; it provides your core fuel. The same goes for the mind. What you feed the mind, especially in those waking moments—researchers debate whether it's the first half hour or first hour—instructs the subconscious, which runs the central nervous system, as to whether or not today we are ahead versus behind. Calm versus nervous. Happy versus upset. Good mood, bad mood. All of this gets formed early in the day and becomes very very difficult to shape without a huge exogenic shock.
I've been asking high performance people that I meet, "Tell me about your morning routine," and what I've noticed is that the calmest big dogs that I've ever done business with—like Mike Rawlings, the former Pizza Hut CEO now running for mayor in Dallas, or John Maxwell, the great leadership author—always say, "You get up like a bird. You stretch, you own the morning."
The big recommendation I make to entrepreneurs is no matter how you do it, don't go online for the first 30 minutes you're awake, and specifically, don't check your e-mail. E-mail is just too random. In Vegas, they have a rule that if the gambler stays at the table long enough, they lose. That's why the drinks are free and they pump fresh oxygen in on the strip. If you subject yourself to random media intake, that'd be just like going to the store, putting a blindfold on, and just eating anything you got in your hands. That's what you do when you open up your inbox. That's what you do when you begin to surf the web—turn on Twitter and Facebook, are you kidding me?
For whatever reason, the Internet is a wonderful hate incubator. Bad stuff travels faster than good stuff. Political hatred, economic bad news, natural disaster updates—those are grease lightning, especially over social media or television. If you wake up, check your e-mail, surf social media, and watch the early news, you're sunk, because there is no way your subconscious is going to be programmed to be moving forward that day. You cannot resist your thoughts, and your thoughts are a function of what you put into your head.
