by Brian Wong
In other words, tie your idea to something you know they care about, and that they realize everybody will care about. If you’ve got a great vision, pretty soon it won’t be just yours—it’ll be everybody’s.
Google’s vision was connecting the world’s information, which before they came around really was not well connected. There were search engines, but they were nothing like Google’s, and didn’t excite passion and loyalty among the company’s employees, customers, the media, or anyone else.
Google changed all that. Their warp-speed functionality and efficiency was so sick that it was like a noble cause. News flash: Not all noble causes need to be about world peace or hunger. If you can eliminate traffic jams or make the Internet work the way it should, you have something that’s as powerful as almost any mission. Helping the average person by making his or her life just a little bit easier every day is a big deal, and worthy of being considered visionary.
A vision like Google’s is so exciting that it leads to other grand visions. Google Earth and the Google Self-Driving Car Project are two examples. They inspire passion not just because they are cool, flashy products, but because they are part of a grander vision to make people’s lives better through connectedness and information. These are the kinds of things that people don’t just want to buy but want to be part of. Nobody wants to be part of something mediocre.
Disney is another company that tied itself to a concept: wholesome family values. The company practically invented the concept of high-quality family entertainment, long before it branched into films aimed at an older market and became a powerhouse studio and network. Now, even when it offers a product that is neither family-oriented nor high-quality, people forgive it, and wait for the next Disney blockbuster.
At Kiip, I make sure that everything we do and say aligns with our vision. I didn’t go into meetings telling people that Kiip could create good ads. I went in there saying, “I know you guys hate to tap on banner ads. So do I. I’ve got a solution.” I wasn’t just offering a new form of interaction and engagement. I was offering a new way to help people fall in love with products. By rewarding the consumer during peak moments of achievement in apps and games with rewards, Kiip was building the kind of bond between products and consumers that ads just can’t create.
I started with a big, true idea, and it caught on like wildfire.
That vision attracted some amazing people to our company. These people felt like they were creating the future, not just creating ads. Our work reflects this, and we wanted everyone in the industry to understand the “why” behind the model we were creating.
Our next step was to use the reputation of excellence we created to expand that vision. Although the idea started with simply rewarding users in games, that was too limiting—the market was finite. Then we realized a new truism: Users were experiencing achievement moments in all the apps they used every day, not just games. We tied our company to that vision, and started working with a variety of other mobile apps and sites.
That’s when it got super-exciting.
And we’re only a few years old, with many visions yet to appear. Everyone has a vision. What’s yours?
Creativity is arguably the greatest of all superpowers.
By definition, it’s the heart and soul of start-ups because those companies—spoiler alert—start something. A start-up’s core concept is almost always something created from nothing but the creativity of its founder.
Creativity is a necessary ingredient for any successful start-up. Opening a new car wash with your buddies is not really a start-up. That’s been done. A start-up is opening a car wash that cleans cars in some new and unique way—something so much better than the old kind of car wash that people everywhere will want to do it that way.
That said, you don’t need to pull ideas out of thin air to be creative. Creating something is generally a matter of re-creating something, even if the reinvention is as dramatic as the difference between an encyclopedia and the Internet.
You can tell the most ridiculously imaginative people in the world to come up with an idea of what an alien looks like, and almost all of the aliens will look essentially humanoid—arms, legs, head, eyes. That’s because the only thing we’ve ever understood about a living being is that it’s a component of appendages: a body and a head. It’s almost impossible to imagine an intelligent being that doesn’t follow those rules—even if you’re one of the most imaginative people in the world.
The point is: If even our wildest imaginations are re-creations of existing things, so is everything else.
Creation doesn’t even need to be an otherworldly vision. The creative genius of the Model T was that it was essentially a re-creation—albeit a revolutionary one—of the horse and buggy. Henry Ford didn’t dream it up out of nowhere; he simply reinvented something that had been around for centuries in a way that no one had ever thought of, and it morphed from a dream into a reality that shot around the world.
“As I look out upon this sea of eager young faces…”
That’s how a lot of people start school commencement speeches—so of course I don’t.
I prefer “Helloooo!” with a fast hop to the podium and a big smile that says there’s no place in the world that’s more exciting than right here, right now.
That’s how I started my most recent commencement address, in my hometown of Vancouver, B.C., at the very unique Bodwell High School, a private boarding school for hand-picked students. About 80 percent of them are international—from Russia, Asia, Latin America, and various places with rapidly growing economies—who come from cultures in which parents value education enough to let their kids go far from home for an amazing opportunity, no matter how much they’ll miss them.
The title of my speech was “Being Young and Rocking It!” I knew the kids would like that, and my secondary agenda was to audition the central theme of The Cheat Code. I wanted to put it right in people’s faces and see if they lit up. They did.
I’m sure that a lot of you readers of The Cheat Code are young, or at least feel that way. When you’re trying to put your own stamp on the world, it’s easy to feel young: excited, hopeful, scared to start, and even more scared not to.
So here’s the graduation speech version of The Cheat Code, rendered as seven talking points. Think of them as your Lucky Seven:
1. Be yourself. I started my speech with a great quote: “Be yourself, because everybody else is already taken.” I reminded the kids that no matter how old they got, other people would always be trying to tell them who they really are and what they should be doing. But at the end of the day, I said, whatever these things are and whatever you do have to feel right to you. If you can answer yes to the question “Am I happy?” then whatever you’re doing is right. If someone tells you otherwise, screw ’em.
2. Reinvent and repurpose your weaknesses into strengths. I knew these students had probably come to Canada thinking that they’d be at a big disadvantage going to school in a foreign country, learning in a non-native language. But almost without exception, they’d discovered that speaking another language fluently was a huge plus. This same experience, I said, would repeat itself forever. It’s like a Jedi mind trick. You can easily transform what is typically perceived to be a weakness into a big strength. It’s all in how you think about it.
3. Audacity differentiates. I told them to forget about fitting in, and find the best ways to be different. I urged them to hold with all their heart to the skills they’d learned from extracurricular activities back home, activities that weren’t necessarily popular in Canada, because those would be skills that many Canadian kids didn’t necessarily have. A fact that is both frightening and fantastic is that we all came off the same basic conveyor belt, but if you’re the guy who knows how to build your own model, you’ve got something unique. Every special skill you’ve got will someday become meaningful, and it’ll happen when you least expect it. Those are the things that will ultimately make you stand out from eve
ryone sitting next to you who graduated with the same degree. The more differentiated you are, the more indispensable you can become.
4. Think big. There’s always a way to tweak an idea and make it absolutely massive. Don’t think “I’m gonna build a plane.” Think “I’m gonna build a rocket ship.” (Or not. Elon Musk did that already. How about “I’m gonna build a jetpack”? No, NASA cornered that one. What about a whole new way to get to the moon! Now we’re getting closer! Kiip thinking.)
5. Just ask. I love this mini cheat. So underrated. Always ask for something better than what’s offered. If people say no, so what? If they say yes, awesome! No one knows how to help you if you don’t know how to ask. What do you get if you don’t ask for anything? That’s easy: exactly what you asked for.
6. Little things matter. They didn’t really want to hear it, but I told the students that the tiny things their parents forced them to do would soon pay off. You remember: Smile. Brush your teeth. Pick up after yourself. Plan ahead. Finish what you start. These are the seeming trivialities that sculpt the adults we become. As time passes and our power and responsibilities expand, so do these good habits, until one day finishing what you start turns into making one more little tweak on a tough project, and voilà—you’ve suddenly got a million-dollar discovery. It may seem like pointless nagging when you’re a kid, but later on it all starts to make sense.
7. Everything that exists was built by somebody. Credit for the last one goes to Steve Jobs, who made a forty-second video out of the idea. It went so viral that half the people in tech needed antiretroviral therapy. Jobs was walking down the street one day when it hit him that no matter what he looked at—the traffic lights, the sidewalks, the stores—everything had been created by a human being who was no smarter than him and millions of others. He saw with crystalline clarity that every person has the power and the potential to be a person who built something. When you realize that, you’ll never be the same. When you build something, the world will never be the same.
That’s it. Toss your cap into the air. But don’t wait for it to fall.
Get busy.
The world is waiting.
I could have called this cheat “The Entrepreneur Mind Trick.” You’ll see why.
Entrepreneurship, as I’ve said elsewhere, can’t be spoon-fed to you in school, so there must be another path to it, right?
There is, but it’s not necessarily something you can see.
Here’s an analogy: Last year I fulfilled one of my fantasies by learning to drive race cars. And shortly thereafter it dawned on me that being an entrepreneur is a bit like a race car driver…driving blindfolded.
Let me explain what I mean. First they put us through safety training, and showed us slides that revealed the proper techniques. Everybody walked out of class thinking they knew what they needed to know.
Then we went out on the course—an actual, professional track—and all that learning flew right out the window.
The point is, you can’t teach car racing with slides. The value of the slides was in showing you that certain things would happen that would scare the shit out of you, but that you’d live…probably. The slides weren’t really instruction—they were just psychotherapy.
The real learning came only when I raced the full track like a bat out of hell, over and over clocking hundreds of miles a day, to the point where I almost didn’t even need to look at the road. It came when I got to the point where I knew every inch of the track and could feel it in my mind and body. When I knew, even without looking: when I’d hit the straightaways, where I’d need to mash down on the accelerator, when I’d arrived at the stretches where I should back off, turns where I needed to feather the brakes, and turns where I’d slam down on them. Same places, every time.
Professional drivers run the same tracks thousands of times. They can do it blindfolded. Literally. Well, probably literally. Nobody tries it, because that would be stupid. Fun—like in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby—but still stupid.
Navigating a racetrack purely by feel, in the same way a pianist navigates a keyboard without looking (and just like the muscle memory that governs all other sports), has a lot in common with entrepreneurship. You can learn muscle memory, but you can’t teach it. You’ve got to let go, and let your brain and your body work it out on their own.
Entrepreneurship isn’t something in which you consciously say: “I’m going to be an entrepreneur today! And the first step is this, then that….” It’s just a way you operate. A way you live your life. A style. An ethic. Like driving a race car, it turns you on.
That’s why I resist people picking my brain on how to be an entrepreneur. They’re really just asking for the equivalent of those training videos: glorified therapy sessions, so they won’t be so scared.
You won’t make it as an entrepreneur if you’re not scared. Fear is your friend. If you’re not scared, it means you’re where somebody else has already been. Immediate disqualification. Go somewhere new.
When you’re there, don’t look for road signs. Just accept that you were born to be there.
At that point, you can call yourself an entrepreneur.
There are character traits that are so common among successful entrepreneurs that it seems as if these people had them in their DNA on the day they were born. They didn’t.
In entrepreneurship, everything is earned and learned. But that doesn’t mean that just anybody can earn and learn the character of an entrepreneur.
It gets even more complicated, and more exclusive, the closer you look.
Almost nobody develops these qualities and character from actually being an entrepreneur. Generally, you become an entrepreneur because you earned and learned them somewhere else. And if you don’t have most of them by now, your road to entrepreneurship may be rocky.
If you’ve got them, though, you’re already well on your way, and just need to find the right project, right people, right time, and right place to put them to work. So what are these elusive qualities that make a great entrepreneur?
Start with trust. You’ve got to be able to grant an almost blind trust in the special people in your life. If you can’t give that to your business team, they won’t have the room and the confidence they need to create excellence.
You can’t hand out trust like candy, though, or you’ll get burned beyond recognition. Part of the learned aspect of this quality is being able to sort out the people who will help you from the people who will fuck you. If you keep the ratio in your favor, you’ll do fine.
You also need intensely thick skin. If you’re successful, you will be insulted, doubted, and double-crossed; in fact, the more successful you become, the more often this will happen. Don’t take it personally. Don’t dwell on it. Sometimes it’s just a tactic, sometimes it’s just bullshit, and sometimes it’s something you can learn from. Pull anything positive from it that you can, and move on.
Learn to compartmentalize. If your boyfriend dumps you, somebody steals your credit cards, and your best friend is the reason your boyfriend dumped you, show up for work like it never happened. It has nothing to do with work. Ignore it. Walk it off. If your first meeting of the day is a disaster, go into the next one like it never happened. There’s a time and place to sort out your emotions and grow from your losses. Real time is not that time. Real time is each discrete moment, in and of itself, each born anew. Revel in the fact that real time is separate from all the other bullshit.
Be pit-bull tenacious and relentless. These may sound like they’re the exact same thing, but they’re actually somewhat different: Tenacity is the ability to endure bad things, and relentlessness is the drive to pursue good things. They’re a good team. With either quality, you’ve got to have the conviction, even on the darkest days, that you can succeed. Tenacity and relentlessness will energize you to the point where you become almost impervious to fatigue. They offer you a constant state of excitement. There’s one little drawback: You only learn tenacity from ge
tting beaten down. If you’ve always had things handed to you on a platter, it’s not a quality that will come naturally to you. I don’t see a lot of great entrepreneurs who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth. But I do see some, because having advantages can be great for developing relentlessness. People who come from success expect success, and so they are more likely to relentlessly go after it. Those who allow that privilege to make them lazy never get anywhere, of course. But those who are happy to work their asses off do well, especially if they’re lucky enough to avoid huge, demoralizing setbacks—or develop the tenacity to endure them. The tiny minority of people who combine privilege, tenacity, and relentlessness are absolutely deadly.
Resourcefulness is another must. You need to know exactly what resources are at your disposal, and how you can rearrange the pieces on your proverbial chessboard to use each and every one to your maximum advantage. If you’ve got very limited resources, you’ve got to learn to make something out of nothing. That’s hard—but great entrepreneurs do it all the time. One way they do it is to bluff. If you’re good at bluffing, you can leap over obstacles like they’re not even there. One caveat: When you do bluff, you’d better have a good fallback position. Reckless bluffing is so transparent that not even you will believe your bullshit, and people will smell your fear and kick your ass out the door.
Bluffing’s bigger, better brother is confidence, another indispensable quality. You need to believe—really believe, and not just kid yourself—that you’ve got something great. Your belief will make that thing real. You’ve got to be so good at convincing yourself that your belief in yourself becomes contagious. When you’re with someone who is truly confident, you cannot distinguish whether what they’ve got is real or if they’re just pulling it out of their ass—and you don’t care! I know, it’s really insane. But the best entrepreneurs are insane, in the positive sense of the word.