Dave Smith

How to Fast Forward Your Goals

 

When the mood surrounding your industry is dark and the outlook isn't good, how can one truly find confidence? Should you fake it until they believe it, or does confidence need to be organic?
The trick is that mood isn't reality. Napoleon Bonaparte said that the leader's role is to define reality and then give hope. When disaster strikes, it's really important for entrepreneurs to understand that it's a great leveling of the playing field. All of the weakest people with the poorest media habits will be scared for a really long time. You cannot trust the media during a recession; the accuracy level of economic and financial reporting is so low on the back-end of these recessions, it is alarming. You just have to understand that this is a time where you've got to create a mastermind group of writers, journalists, and bloggers that you trust, you absolutely believe, that their editorial intent is accuracy above distribution, that they care more about being right than being big. That's really important, and you have to reduce the number of lines of information you get, and cut off the bad news networks. Companies that do that, as a culture, will be able to make much better jumps and leaps.

If you looked at every recession since 1901, you always see entrepreneurs or organizations make great leaps during this down cycle before the recovery hits. In that tepid period, like we are right now and have been for the last two years, they always say that you're three times more likely to make it during that period than a market top.

In 1932, Kellogg's makes the move and jumps over Post after being the Yahoo! of search engines, and they do it because they release Rice Krispies in 1932 against all recommendations. They understood that the technicals were strong for a promotion of a new cereal, there was still market demand, that one slice of CPG wasn't dead in the water, and they knew Post was going to sit around and ask themselves, "Is the Depression over?"

In 2001, the worst idea ever is to release the iPod when the dot-com crash was clearly on and Apple was taking a beating in the market. [Steve] Jobs noticed, though, that Sony, as a big slow company would be freaked out as much as he was, and they wouldn't respond for a year or two. He really had to make that bet at that time because everybody had a Sony Walkman; if you told me that Apple would own the personal music device space in less than 24 months, I would've told you it had to be perfect timing. He had to do this when no one was watching, and that's exactly what he did, and he did it again with the iPad.

How do companies do this? They do this because there's a gap between the mood and the technical condition. In that gap is opportunity, but to seize that gap, you've got to have confidence. It gets back to the whole idea that you have to feed your mind the right stuff, because the fear of poverty is incredibly big. That's why Napoleon Hill wrote the book Think and Grow Rich in 1937: The fear of poverty, he thinks, is the greatest fear known to man. It's something that entrepreneurs should take advantage of. I always increase my revenue and wealth personally in the most dramatic forms during recessions. If we didn't have recessions, I don't know what I would be doing right now.

Entrepreneurs love to fly solo, but in order to get out of the bad loop, do entrepreneurs need to ask for help?
Yes. Stan Woodward was my boss at AudioNet/Broadcast.com, and I remember the first day Stan came on the job taking over business services for [Mark] Cuban. He gets us up in the crow's nest and he says, "Listen, there's no such thing as the self-made man. It's just not true, it's arrogance. You can neither do this by yourself nor enjoy this by yourself. The other thing you have to remember is your dream is bigger than you, so don't go down alone. Swallow your pride, and go get help." I'll never forget that, and that's the true entrepreneurial spirit.

You're not a lone ranger. You can't do this by yourself, no matter how smart you are and how great you make presentations on the fundraising roadshow and how awesome you are in the cube farm. There's still a bunch of other people that made you successful. You have to own that, you have to understand that, and with that humility, you can also maybe reach out to previous bosses in your life—people you looked up to and respected—or your competitors, who are besting you. That's one of the best sources of mentorship, and that's something I learned really early in life, is that success is not exclusive—it's really contagious. If you want to really suck in business, just go find the other losers and create a community of them to pick on the big guys. There's nothing worse than underdog mastermind groups. It's like all of those bands that don't have a following, that stand in the back of the room while a commercially successful band is playing. They say two things: One, "I wish they let us open for them," and two, "They're lucky."

If you're a disruptive entrepreneur and you're in a space where you're causing problems, go hang out with traditional companies who are still stomping you, offer to tell them what little you know, and you'll be surprised what they'll teach you. I tell people all the time as authors, don't be jealous of that author that's on The New York Times list, go see if he needs help. You might learn something.

If there's only one thing you hope readers take away from your book, what would it be?
There's enough to go around. There's enough to share. The only way you're going to believe this is through confidence, but when you believe there's enough to go around and you share in that moment, you're worth something. This point of view, "enough to share," is the secret to success in personal life and in business life.

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