by Brian Wong
Empathy really matters. Not sympathy, though, because even though that’s a valid, kind emotion, it’s one that’s says: “Yeah, you’re fucked.” That’s just not productive. Empathy simply says: “I know how you feel.” It doesn’t convey hopelessness.
Empathy also includes the ability to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes when there is no particular problem. In that way, it’s a lot like intuition. An empathetic, intuitive person can size someone up in thirty seconds and know exactly how to sway them.
The active aspect of empathetic intuition is persuasion. Think about those people who are so good at making you do things that you think it was your own idea. In those situations, the person simply recognized what you wanted and gave you a good reason to pursue it. That’s the power of persuasion. Another element of persuasion is observational skill, sometimes referred to as sensitivity. If you’re sensitive, you don’t always need to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes to see how they feel, and you don’t need to rely on the intangible element of intuition. You just watch people. You study their body language, their tone, the way they relate to others, how they dress, who they know, and what they like. You play Sherlock Holmes. It’s not rocket science. All of these qualities are sometimes rolled together into what people now call emotional intelligence. Here’s the ultimate cheat on having high emotional intelligence: Be the best you. Be what your parents tried to teach you to be when you were a kid: a good, confident, ambitious, strong person, who sincerely cares about others and really pays attention to them. I know, it was hard to do then, and it’s hard now. Start by taking an honest look at yourself. See if you’re close to being the best possible you. If you are, you’ve learned the character that makes a great entrepreneur.
My favorite entrepreneurs are the ones who literally don’t care what other people think.
Those are the people who have built their own model for success and execute like machines. They don’t care about people’s perceptions or opinions, or anything at all, for that matter, except their vision. They’re almost blindly obsessed with what they’re creating, and they don’t do it for the glory of people complimenting them.
They do it because they have this burning itch. They feel like they have to create something new. They think that if they don’t, it’s going to almost dismantle them. Their goals are practically an obsession. In a way, they’re obsessed with being obsessed.
I admire the people who are obsessed, because only truly obsessed people are likely to go as far as they need to in order to execute their ideas, and do it all successfully. It’s like somebody has cast a spell over them—or they’ve cast it over themselves—and they’re in a kind of trance. Some of them won’t snap out of it until they actually get it done. Occasionally they’ll put so much into it that they almost die trying.
One way to know if you have this quality is if you feel like you just can’t be half in or half out. The people who feel like they can still do something by being only half in will probably be half successful. These are usually people who build their business around their lifestyle, instead of building their life around their business. They’re doing it to make a living—to build an income stream that helps them maintain their current standard of living without interfering with the other things they love to do. Some people are okay with that, and plenty of them make a perfectly sustainable income that feeds their family and allows them to have a great life.
If that’s what you want, fine. But I’d personally rather be one of those balls-to-the-wall moon shot entrepreneurs who aren’t trying to preserve anything and who just love what they’re doing. For them, entrepreneurship is their lifestyle, and sometimes they don’t even give a shit about making money from it. They just do it because it’s what they love.
For some of these people, it’s almost like they intentionally pick things that look impossible, just because that’s what it takes to really have an impact on the world. It’s that impact that gives them a gleam in their eye. Or sometimes it’s just the sheer impossibility of it—the fear factor—that ignites that electrifying spark.
There’s another, even crazier type of entrepreneur who seems to have the opportunity to make all the money they want, but they spend every penny obsessing over their passion. Those are the ones that are insanely messed up in the head—but are awesome. You cannot know what they will do. Maybe their idea will result in an astonishing, world-changing, mind-altering outcome—or maybe it will just turn out to be a fabulous funeral pyre. These are the people who know how to accept both outcomes. They’ve seen the worst that could happen and aren’t fazed by it at all.
I love to meet those people. It’s just so cool to relate to them when you’re trying to figure out what problem they’re so obsessed with. They’re so passionate, so excitable, that it’s just refreshing.
These are the people who are almost literally shooting for the moon, and it’s almost impossible not to feel inspired by them.
The good news is that you don’t need to be insanely smart to be insanely successful.
The better news is that there’s never a day when you can put your brain on autopilot and coast. As an entrepreneur, you’re creating your life and your company moment by moment, and each moment counts.
If the second part—the better news—sounded like bad news, you’re probably not a natural entrepreneur.
There are tens of millions of people who love to chill at work and go through the motions of fulfilling a reasonable minimum of their duties. It’s less taxing, no doubt about it, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to avoid stress.
However, that’s not the intellectual mind-set of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs would rather be excited than relaxed. They’d rather be challenged than comfortable. Instead of avoiding stress, they relish it because it adds to their sense of accomplishment.
It’s good for an entrepreneur to have a high IQ because that helps with learning and retention. Even so, graduating at the top of your class or being a MENSA member is not a requirement for entrepreneurial achievement. This sort of intellectual status is probably a greater asset in the conventional corporate world, but even the biggest companies don’t place artificial requirements on anyone’s IQ anymore.
The most fundamental, indispensable intellectual quality of a successful entrepreneur, in my opinion, is that they are simultaneously logical and creative. They see the obvious, which sounds easy but isn’t. They can sort things out. They can understand and explain complicated things to ordinary people. They can break down complex problems without getting tangled up in details that don’t matter and without missing details that do matter.
Successful entrepreneurs are constantly ingesting information and then relaying it to the right people as efficiently as possible. They make sure that everybody understands the basic issues and that everyone is working together to achieve the same, shared goal.
This kind of problem management is not brain surgery. That’s why you don’t need to be Einstein. Ironically, though, an actual brain surgeon—whose gifts lie in the minutiae and who generally have no special affinity for team projects—might find entrepreneurship more difficult than brain surgery.
So don’t worry about being brilliant. Worry about coming up with brilliant ideas.
Luck, like shit, happens. You don’t have much to say about it.
As I mentioned in Cheat 53, lots of people think serendipity is the same thing as luck, but it isn’t. Serendipity—defined as a valuable, unexpected occurrence—doesn’t just happen. Serendipity is luck that happens when you keep your eyes open.
Probably the most serendipitous thing that ever happened to me was when I was playing hockey at age 15. At that age, I didn’t match up to most of the other guys in muscle power, but I played balls-to-the-wall and held up well, which was great for my self-esteem—until the day my knee got hit so hard that it almost shattered the lower growth plate in my femur. That would have stunted the growth in my leg forever, but it missed the plate by a millimeter. T
hat was lucky!
The doctor at the ER initially took an X-ray and saw nothing, so he told me I had a tendon tear and that I should go home and try to limit my walking until it mended. If I had, I would have walked with a limp for the rest of my life. My mother is a nurse, though, and she didn’t agree, and was able to bump me to first in line for an MRI, which revealed the fracture. That was serendipitous! Not just because it kept my leg intact, but because when your mother does something like that for you, it creates gratitude and respect that you remember all your life.
For about a year after the injury, I was in a wheelchair and on crutches, and had to depend on my mom and dad and friends to do the most basic things for me. Here are the likely pastimes for a teenage boy who is suddenly disabled: playing video games, watching a lot of porn, or developing an intimate relationship with Marvel Comics. I chose a different option. I decided to sharpen my design skills using online tutorials, which proved to be a huge stroke of serendipity, because that’s what kick-started my career. If you’re thinking, “That was a matter of choice, not serendipity,” you’re giving me too much credit. The other three natural proclivities get old in a big hurry, even for a teenage male. In any case, I discovered that my mind was as hungry for exercise as my busted leg was.
The greater serendipity during my rehab, though, was finding out how truly generous my family and friends were. That’s something you can’t fully comprehend until life knocks you down. But I squeezed an even greater serendipity out of it:
I discovered that even a teenage kid can start a company.
Two days before I wrote this, I got back on the ice for the first time since my injury—and I was as nervous as a ten-year-old, despite now being the CEO of an international company. I’d already practiced a few times, but I was super-rusty, was pretty sure that I didn’t have the stamina to play a full game, and knew it was going to hurt my pride when I had to punk out.
Then one of the guys on our team got in a fight and was kicked out of the game. Shit! There was nobody to sub in, and I was already spent. Bad luck!
But fuck luck—it was serendipity! I sucked it up, played way better than I could have done by choice, and pushed myself so hard that I was too exhausted to even drive myself home.
But I did get home, slept like a baby, and woke up with that rare sense of physical confidence that you can acquire only by pushing your body beyond what’s normally possible. You can’t get that kind of rush from making money, or traveling the world, or being on the cover of a magazine.
It touched some emotions I hadn’t felt in ages—nine years, to be exact. And now I can’t wait to get back on the ice.
Fuck luck. Serendipity happens, and it feels amazing.
A good actor—and remember that all entrepreneurs are good actors—can make a story come to life right before your eyes. A great actor can do that with mostly just body language.
I’ve seen hundreds of sales meetings where the salesperson puts on such a memorable performance that somebody should have been filming it. Their ideas come alive, and captivate the hearts of the audience much like a Broadway star might.
But that doesn’t make the ideas good. The concept can be dumb as dog shit and still seem like a good idea at the time.
Reality makes its welcome appearance, though, the moment you start putting things on paper. When you do that, you can usually tell in one or two pages if an idea is smart or stupid. The smaller the words, the better. No analogies, no allegories, no stories. Just plain facts.
Everything before the written word is just more clutter in the ether. It’s nothing but somebody talking into thin air.
Amazon knows this. Before I made my first pitch to Amazon’s partnership teams, they told me that they would prefer I not use PowerPoint. They don’t want somebody to draw them a picture or put on a performance. They’re all about the written word, fully formed—explaining in layman’s terms exactly what the proposal or project is, preferably in one paragraph. It makes sense to force yourself into a format that kiips everything in perspective. Writing it down is one way to do this, and it works.
Writing things down also provides another huge advantage: You remember them. It kills me to be saying something so obvious, but I’m afraid it’s not obvious to a lot of people.
I’ve been in tons of meetings where I look around, and it’s like: “Who is taking notes? Anybody? Just me?”
When I’m in one of those meetings and it’s with people who work with me, I say, “Why are you not writing this down?” And they say: “Oh, I’ll remember it.” Which is when I say, “No, you won’t!”
And then I feel like a parent, but I can’t afford to just blow it off. I need them to remember.
There were too many times when somebody said, “What was it you told me to do on that project?” Then I have to look it up—because I do write stuff down—and tell them again. If there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s having to tell somebody the same thing twice.
It’s not just a matter of doubling my workload. It makes me wonder: “What else did they forget? I hope it’s not something that’s going to hurt the company.”
Another advantage of note-taking is that it triples your brain’s access to the memory. Note-taking adds a kinesthetic and visual memory to the auditory one.
It goes even further. If you don’t write things down, you end up cluttering your mind, leaving less memory storage for more important things and less brain capacity for other processes, including creativity.
When you relieve your brain of unnecessary burdens, you leave more space open for momentous ideas. If you’re really smart, you develop dirt-simple systems that even let you free your mind from having to remember trivialities such as where you left your car keys—like always leaving them in the same place.
Eleanor Roosevelt—the most powerful person ever to live in the White House without being president—is reported to have once said, “Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, and great minds talk about ideas.” Here’s a logical extension: Teeny-tiny minds talk about where their car keys are.
The digital era makes it easier than ever to record memories. After all, the absolute essence of the computer is memory, and when this function is used optimally, it advances human thought exponentially. We can effectively use computers to consciously erase trivialities from our brains’ frontal lobes.
We’re already seeing that digital power transform some of the most mentally advanced professions, including those of doctors and lawyers. Before computerization, physicians and attorneys needed to have such an incredible memory for details that it curtailed their abilities in other areas. Now that computers make a vast database of medical and legal information immediately available at the click of a mouse, doctors and lawyers can focus on other things, such as being more creative, empathetic, and able to perceive a situation holistically.
On the most basic level, taking notes is just a sign of being organized. How long do poorly organized people last at Kiip? Not long, and that’s all I need to remember. What’s the average length of their employment? I have no idea, but if you give me a minute to look at my files, I can tell you. I certainly can’t remember.
Our culture’s mythology around the ideal of the rugged individual, combined with all the hyped-up media stories of the brilliant lone entrepreneur coming up with a billion-dollar idea while tinkering in his basement or building a computer in his garage, has led to the recent celebration of the often-referenced “power of one.” But really, there’s more power in two. Three is even better, and four is better yet.
The greatest power in the power of one is getting those other people on board. There is no significant company that consists of just one person; the path to greatness simply can’t be traveled alone.
Some people measure their success by how much they can do without any help. But real success invariably includes the ability to bring people together and to create a whole that’s bigger than the sum of its parts—a whole that’s made mo
re powerful by the strength of shared visions and goals.
If you’re the founder of a start-up or are in the first wave of any entrepreneurial endeavor, your first important job is to find the right people to fight alongside you: people who will be like loyal brothers and sisters—people who are brilliant, genuinely kind, fun to work with, and tolerant of ambiguity.
You are essentially the team captain. It’s your job to pick a winning team.
The main thing, particularly in the beginning, is to find people who can do what nobody else on the team can. If everyone has the exact same skills and strengths, you’re digging yourself into a hole of wasted money and probably dissension.
The best teams are built thoughtfully, to ensure that everyone’s goals, values, and ideals are aligned. When this happens, great things just start coming together naturally. Success feels effortless, like it was inevitable.
People often use the analogy of the team captain when they talk about leadership. But in reality, if you’re a manager or a team leader, you’re less like the team captain and more like a train conductor.
Why? When you’re the conductor, you’re usually the only one who knows what the final destination is—or even the day-to-day direction. It’s not always valuable for the whole team to know, because you need to have some people who are totally focused on excellence in their own piece of the puzzle. If everybody tries to have the big picture, it can get in the way, especially when you need to change course.