This week, I turned 45 years old, and today, I wanna run through the best lessons I've had in the last twenty five years. What do I wish I knew twenty five years ago, having twenty five years of business and adulthood? I started out as an entrepreneur in my early twenties. I built seven startups that went from zero to a million in their first twelve months. I've helped three businesses that went north of 10,000,000 in valuation. I've crashed businesses where I had to start again. I've done that multiple times. I've had an amazing marriage. I've had three kids, and I've had multiple billionaire mentors that I've spent actual hangout time with. I've traveled the world. I've been on private jets and big fancy yachts. I've backpacked through jungles. So from all of that, I've learned lots of different lessons. And today, wanna run through all of my heuristics, heuristics, all of the key ideas that I've learned in the last twenty five years that I would love to go back and share with someone in their early twenties is just getting started. In fact, the last lesson I wanna share with you in this video, it's gonna be a little bit emotional for me to share. Oh, this one makes me emotional.
So let's go through them one at a time. In
no particular order, but I'm gonna start with this harsh truth. You get what you pitch for, and you're always pitching. So let me be really blunt with you. I don't think you're pitching big enough. I really do not think that you are expressing who you really are in the world. I think that you contain really incredible insights. I think you've got great opinions. I think you've got great ways that you would love to steer the ship, but you're not telling people. You're not talking to people, or you're telling them in a soft gentle way. You're not pitching it into existence.
What I wish I could say to you if you're a 20 year old Dan is get off the fence and start pitching things into reality. Harsh truth number two is prolific beats perfect. See, what I think is holding you back is that you just wanna put something out that everyone loves, and you're just scared of what people are gonna say if you put something out that's a little bit mediocre or that's not great. You must get over this. Please, I'm begging you, put more stuff out there. If people don't like it, it's just data. The truth is in the age of algorithms,
the stuff that's no good won't get traction anyway. Only a few 100 people are gonna see it. It's only the stuff that's good that takes off. So the more stuff you put out there, the good stuff has an opportunity to rise to the top. Be more bold. Be more brave. Get more stuff out there. For me personally, I've written seven different books and I've co authored a few as well. I've put out hundreds of different videos on YouTube. Some of them get great views, some of them not so much. You might have seen me on Diary of a CEO or Ali Abdaal's podcast, which got millions of views. If you look a little deeper, I've done hundreds of podcasts that got less than 200 views. And what I've discovered is failure or mediocracy is not the opposite of success. It's the lead up to success. It's a key ingredient of success. You can't have success without mediocracy
and failure as part of the journey. Here's the harsh truth. Older generations got the opportunity to buy property for cents on the dollar, and it's unbelievably unfair how difficult it is to get on the housing ladder. It's so unfair how difficult it is to buy into stock markets that are massively inflated at the moment in many cases.
A lot of the traditional assets, the traditional ways that your parents and grandparents became wealthy and became rich and no longer accessible to younger generations. But here's the good news. This new generation has this new completely different type of asset. An asset is anything that adds value regardless of what you're doing. If you've got a book out there on Amazon, that is an asset that's adding value regardless of what you're doing. If you've got a YouTube video that's winning you business and bringing you clients, that's an asset that's doing things regardless of where you are, whether you're on holiday or whether you're taking the dog for a walk. That video is out there winning business for you. These are new economy assets that you can buy really, really cheap. Your children and your grandchildren will say, I cannot believe how lucky you were to be alive at the time when YouTube was just getting started, to be alive at the time where podcasts
were in their infancy, to be alive at a time where you could put a book on Amazon relatively easy. Right? So there's these new economy assets, this intellectual capital turned into digital assets.
That is your opportunity.
And, also, those assets will then lead to being able to buy the more established assets. The first fifteen years of my career was all about building digital assets that gave me enough money to then transfer some of that wealth into traditional assets. Please do not dwell about the opportunities that your parents and grandparents had. Get into the opportunities that are right for you. There are assets that you can own that cost you almost nothing to create. The next harsh truth is most opportunities are downstream from attention. Without attention, you can't make an opportunity come to life. The really harsh truth is that you have a business idea, you wanna get it in front of people. You wanna raise money, you've gotta get in front of people. You wanna sell products, you're gonna have to get in front of people. Getting in front of people is a massive skill. Getting in front of people is an essential ingredient to success. There is no point being a hero in the eyes of your dog and your cat, and nobody else knows who you are. In order to be successful, you have to get attention. There are people who are massive introverts. Richard Branson is a massive introvert. I've met him. I've spent time with him. He's an introvert. Tim Cook is a massive introvert. He was able to hide in the shadow of Steve Jobs for many, many years until such time as he had to get out there and get the attention for Apple. These people, they're introverts, they understand the power of attention. Getting in front of the right people is half the battle. Now you sit there and tell yourself a story that you're not born into the right family. You're not born into the right location.
Stop hiding.
Stop playing small. Stop sitting in the shadows. Stop waiting for someone to point at you and say it's your turn. Or let me, in this video, point at you right now and say it's your turn. Get out there. Get in front of the people that you need to be in front of in order for your ideas to come to life. I have no qualifications.
I have no special skills.
And yet, I put myself out there, and I say, you know what? I'm gonna write a book. I'm gonna put some YouTube videos out there. I'm gonna get myself on podcasts. I'm gonna get in front of the right people. The more I've been able to capture attention, the more I've been able to grow and scale my ideas into reality. The next one is everything is a team sport. Everything that you want is a team sport. Even when you see a solo tennis player playing tennis by themselves on the court behind the scenes is an amazing physiotherapist,
an amazing coach, an amazing assistant.
Right? Everything is a team sport. Half the battle of succeeding in life is recruiting the right team. You've gotta get people onto your team. You cannot do it all on your own. I have never worked in isolation. I've never been on my own. When I was just starting out, I recruited people onto my team. Now who did I recruit onto my team? People who didn't have many opportunities. Now when most people think about recruiting a team, they think about hiring someone who's ex Google or ex JP Morgan. But the person at the local bar or pub is gonna quit their job and come and work with you. That door to door salesperson who's looking for something better will quit their job and come and work with you. Everything's a team sport. If you wanna scale a company, you probably need some mentors, some angel investors, some salespeople to join your team. If you wanna get fit and healthy, you're probably gonna need a team of people around you who wanna go on a fit and health challenge. Stop thinking that you can do this in isolation. Stop thinking that first you'll become successful on your own, and then you'll start hanging out with the right people.
First, you build a team, then you become successful. I don't have any skills, and I also have a fairly fleeting attention span. I leverage people around me who can get things done. I want you to pretend that you have no skill other than the skill of recruiting people onto your team. What if all of your success came from recruitment? Picking people to come and join your team, onboarding them, inspiring them, getting them aligned, giving them a vision, getting them all rowing in the same direction. Right? If that was your only skill, that would be enough. That leads into the next harsh truth, that alignment is a form of magic. Getting people aligned to the same vision is an incredible form of magic. Unbelievable things take place if you can get a team of people into alignment. What does that actually mean? It just means that a group of three, four, five people all want the same things in the next three years. A group of people are all excited to achieve an outcome. A group of people are all excited to solve a problem. If you can be the person who gets a group of people into alignment, you will create magic. One of the craziest things is when you start a major project absolutely not knowing how the hell to do it or what's gonna unfold,
but just simply getting a team of people into alignment that together we're gonna solve these problems, together we're gonna get these outcomes,
it unlocks magical things that you could never have predicted will happen.
Alignment is truly a form of magic. I'd go so far as to say, if the people around you are not aligned to the same goals, it's almost impossible to succeed. What I would say to 20 year old Dan is take the time to get people into alignment. Go out to that cafe,
sit around the table with eight people,
tell them your vision, tell them what you want to achieve, tell them problems that you want to solve, and see if you can get the people to stay at the table and say that they're committed to being part of that team and that they're aligned to it. I would also say to 20 year old Dan, don't try and hold success to yourself.
Get other people to feel that if they succeed, they get to share in the success. We're all gonna create this together. Give people opportunities to earn more money, to have more ownership, to have more fun, to achieve bigger goals, to take the credit. And if you can get other people into alignment so that they get all those benefits as well, you all get to achieve way more than you could on your own. The next harsh truth, life is an energy game. Low energy, low results. Negative energy, negative results. Positive energy, positive results. Optimism, great results. You might sound super smart as a pessimist, but guess what? The optimists win the game. The optimists win the game because they have positive energy, and positive energy attracts positive things into their lives. It attracts the people who say, I'm up for that challenge. I'm ready to go for it. Negative people, people say, you know what? You sound intelligent. You sound right. You sound like you know what you're talking about, but I don't wanna join your team. I don't wanna invest any money behind you. I don't wanna send anybody over your way. Even though you sound like you're smart, I'm not gonna allow you to succeed. Whereas the people who have good energy, they're the ones who get good results. I am seeing so many young people at the moment who have bought into the negative news and the negative algorithms. They've not stopped to think about the fact that those algorithms are fueled by outrage. They are fueled by negative energy. The human brain is two thirds optimized for negativity over positivity. You've gotta make a conscious decision that you wanna have good energy. You have to be the person who blocks out those negative algorithms. Recently, I was blowing up on x.com.
I was getting literally hundreds of thousands of views, but it was causing me negative energy. It was causing me to be down a rabbit hole of negativity.
I called up my team, and I said, I want you change the password on my x account. Lock me out of it. Don't tell me the password. I need to get off this platform because it's too negative. Ever since doing that, boom, my energy levels are back up. I'm positive about the world again, and I'm out there achieving positive things for my life. You know what? The world has plenty of positivity, it also has plenty of negativity. You get to choose which stream you wanna jump into. Do you wanna jump into the stream of negativity, or do you wanna jump into the stream of positivity? Now when I say life is an energy game, there's a deeper layer to this as well. There's actually five energies. There's the energy of purpose and vision. There's the energy of a strategic approach.
There's the energy of the right people, getting the right people aligned,
connecting with people, sharing stories.
There's the energy of rolling up your sleeves and getting stuff done. Work, work, work, work, work, like get it done, do the work that needs to be done. And there's the energy of refinement.
Look at the data, figure out a better way, come up with a system. You need an approach where you figure out which energy am I in right now, and which energy do I need to be in right now, and how do I shift gearing to that energy. Now I'm not talking about the law of attraction and manifestation.
A lot of people take that to mean that you sit in your bedroom writing down your vision and your goals, and you're not talking to anyone and you're pitching anything and you're not taking any action, yes, there is an energy called purpose and vision, but that energy is nothing without the other four energies. The next harsh truth may upset you, and that is environment
dictates performance. The environments that you show up in dictate how the rest of your life is gonna play I have personally gone into prisons, and I've worked with people who are prison inmates. I've worked with people who are drug dealers. And I've spent my time helping to mentor them that if they keep showing up in the environment of drug dealing, they will go back to drug dealing, they'll end up back in prison. I also tell them that the entrepreneurial spark that sits within them that allows them to be a successful drug dealer could also
allow them to build a legitimate business that's wildly successful, but the key thing that I tell them is environment dictates performance. You have to get yourself into an environment where legitimate businesses are being built.
So I tell these ex drug dealers that when they get out of prison,
they don't go back to the same places that they used to go back to. They go to a different part of town. They start networking in angel investor circles. They go to a high net worth bank and go to events that are being put on there. They join a business membership and start meeting legitimate business people. They get themselves enrolled in a tech incubator or a tech accelerator,
and they start getting around tech entrepreneurs. They stop listening to certain types of music that glorify their old life, and they start listening to podcasts that talk about strategies for the new life that they want. So I talk about this idea of environment dictates performance.
In the right environment, everything changes. Now for me personally, in my early twenties, someone dragged me along to a dance class. I had never even thought of going to a dance class in my life, and it was the most embarrassing thing turning up to a dance class for the first time. Little did I realize this was one of the most unbelievably
cool environments I could have ever been a part of. Within my first lesson, I'm spinning girls around, and I'm doing dips, I'm discovering all of these moves. Three years later of doing three dance classes a week for three years, I've got this incredible skill, and dancing is just the most normal thing in the world. But that never would have happened if I hadn't have shown up and put myself in an environment that felt really awkward in week one, but felt totally natural in week ten. So here's the thing. You are holding yourself back because you don't show up into environments that make you feel uncomfortable. You resist showing up in environments that you are the smallest person in the room. And I want you to say to yourself, if I was the best version of myself, what are the types of environments that I would be showing up on a regular basis? The next harsh truth, this is the greatest time ever to be alive. Now I'm hearing a lot of people at the moment. They're like, oh my goodness. The world's such a horrible place. The politics,
houses are so expensive, and there's not great jobs anymore, and all these kind of things. Shut up. If we took a long line of the last thousand ancestors that you had that lived on this planet and they had a chance to push a button and swap places with you to live in this time, they would push it as fast as they humanly could. This would not even be a question. Not long ago, tuberculosis
killed twenty five percent of the population. Not long ago, most men worked down a coal mine. They worked on a fishing boat. They worked in the military getting shot at. Life has been horrible for centuries.
And finally, we have this incredible moment where you can share a message with the world. You can connect with any group of people. You can learn from anyone in the world. Everything you wanna know, ChatGPT is there to tell you about it. You've got a lawyer in your pocket. You've a doctor in your pocket. You've got every PhD ever written fully accessible to you. Oh my goodness. This is the most mind blowing time in the world. Do not glamorize
the past. There was all the same horrible stuff that we've got today, except they didn't have algorithms force feeding it to them. You've gotta get control of the algorithm in your head and say, you know what? I've been born at the most incredible time in history. I'm not gonna waste this opportunity dwelling on the negative stuff. Now if I was to talk to 20 year old Dan, he kind of got it, but he didn't go all in on it. He kind of noticed that YouTube was emerging, but he didn't go all in for another fifteen or twenty years. He kind of saw that digital businesses were a superpower, but he didn't go all in for the next fifteen years. And I would say, my goodness. Don't just, like, intellectualize it. Really own it and go all in on it. We are living in incredible times, young Dan.
Make the most of it. Go all in. Kick the damn doors off the hinges. Okay. The next lesson is about how money has a language. There is a language that goes around money, and if you speak that language, money just opens up to you. The language is called the language of opportunity, not the language of requests. I see so many young people who have a request for the world. I'm passionate, and I want some money to go live my passion. That is a self centered language around what you want. Money doesn't speak that language. Money speaks the language of the opportunity for the person who puts the money in. Money moves around certain documents. There are certain documents that if you have that document, you get to make more money. At a very simple level, if you create a product brochure or a landing page, you get to sell products.
If you create a pitch deck, you get to raise money. The number one reason why people get stuck around money is because they don't speak the language of money. If you wanna have money, you need to learn how to speak the language of money. You need to know the structures. You need to know the documents. You need to do your research into how money works. It sucks, but money is gonna be a massive part of your life for the rest of your life. All the things you wanna do are gonna involve money other than maybe meditation.
So why not invest a little bit of time ASAP to understand just how money works, what are the different structures in the economy, how is a company different from a trust, different from an individual? What are the tax implications of all of those structures? How do you raise money if you need money? If you've got a big idea, but it needs $500,000,
how do you get your hands on $500,000?
I promise you, it's not because you're passionate. It's not because you want it. It's not because you need it. It's not because you requested it, it's because you know how to speak the language of opportunity. When I was 24 years old, I got offered to buy my company for $14,000,000,
and it was an incredible opportunity, but I didn't know how to handle that. I didn't know the documents, I didn't know the structures, and the deal fell through. I didn't get the $14,000,000
that I could have gotten at age 24, and it was simple. I didn't have a mentor who steered me in the direction of talking that level of money.
And because I didn't have all the things in place, the deal didn't go ahead. I learned that lesson the hard way, and I don't want you to learn the lesson the hard way. I want you to be ready for those big opportunities that come along. This brings me to my next harsh truth. There is gold in gray hair. Most of the problems that you're gonna face, somebody's faced them before. If you were to sit down with someone who's 50 or 60 years old, who's been ten, twenty, thirty years on the planet longer than you have, who's faced this thing, who's seen it before, who's seen it a dozen times before, you would discover that some of your biggest problems have easy solutions. You are not spending enough time around older people. They sound a little bit different. Some of their values aren't aligned to your values. Some of their language is out of date, but I promise you there is golden gray hair. I have learned so much by having mentors over the age of 60. When I was in my twenties, I had mentors who were 60.
It is incredible how much you can fast track your life if you just sit down with someone who's 15 or 20 years older and ask them, have you faced this before, or do you know someone who's faced this several times before? Who can you put me in touch with that helps me to solve this? For thousands and thousands of years, we understood the value of having elders in our tribe. We knew that we used to go to elders in order to extract the wisdom that they had, and we've lost that ability. We think that everything is on the Internet. Everything's chat GBT. Well, I promise you, you will discover that people with gray hair have gold. They have wisdom to share. Get around a mentor who's got some gray hair. The next lesson is about having three core values. There came a point in my life where I sat down and I made up three core values. Be brave, have fun, make a dent in the universe. Being brave is getting out of my comfort zone. Having fun is working with people I enjoy working with, getting into alignment, going to fun places, doing fun things, and making a dent in the universe is giving back, trying to make an impact, doing things that add value to others, doing things that change the game, speaking in a way that improves somebody else's life, engaging in projects that improve people's lives. How did I make them up? I imagined myself as a 99 year old man laying in a bed, and a young person comes to me and says, what's the key to a great life? What are the three lessons that you wanna pass on? What came to me is be brave, have fun, make a dent in the universe.
And those three things, I wrote them down, and I said, you know what? That's gonna be my compass. I'm gonna make up three values, and I'm gonna try as hard as I can to live to those three values. As soon as I made up those three values, a lot of decisions became easy. No one ever comes and taps you on the shoulder and says, these are the three values that will serve as a compass in your life. You have to be the one to make them up. Imagine yourself as a 99 year old laying in a bed passing on wisdom to a teenager.
What would be your three key pieces of advice that you would love to give to them?
Alright. Write those three pieces of advice down. Those are the your three core values, and live according to those values for as long as it serves you. This next harsh truth came to me from my very first sales manager, George. He said, Dan, the only truth is the results. Damn. That hit me like a ton of bricks at the time. I thought I knew what I was talking about, but my results weren't showing it. I thought I was good at building rapport. I thought I was really good at talking to people. I thought I was good at asking for the business, but my sales results were in the bottom third of the team. Now there was another guy on the team called Nick, and he was at the top of the results, and I just didn't like the way he was doing things. I thought that he was pissing people off. I thought he was asking questions that were too harsh. And George said, Dan, the only truth is the results. Nick is at the top of the ladder. You're at the bottom of the ladder. Right? If your results don't show it, you don't yet know it. So you need to go out there and take Nick to lunch and ask, what does he know that you don't know? Having great theories about life is one thing, but if your life doesn't reflect that those theories work, you need to question those theories. If you look at someone who has the life that you want and the results that you want, but they think a little bit different to you, you should assume that their way of thinking is actually working. The only truth is the result. See, in theory, you should be able to get academic success. You should be able to get a PhD,
and suddenly your life works out really well. But I can show you lots of people with a PhD who are totally broke. In theory, that person who's a little bit scrappy, that person who just goes and knocks on doors, that person who's cheeky and playful and goes talks to strangers, in theory, that person should be pissing people off. But in reality,
they often are the person who succeeds.
So you can have these luxury beliefs. You can believe that the world is a certain way, but I tell you what, the only truth is the result. If your life doesn't reflect excellence, you don't have excellent beliefs. You have to question your beliefs based on the idea that the only truth is the result. Let's do another harsh truth about money. Money is nothing but a tool. It's completely made up. It's a human invention. It's a story that we tell ourselves. That paper isn't real. It's a shared agreement. Even something like gold, it's a shiny rock that we've all agreed is valuable. Money isn't real. Money is a way of keeping score. Now if you were passionate about sport, it's interesting to keep score because that makes the game interesting, but that's not the game. The game is what happens on the field, and the scoreboard reflects the way that you're playing. Now here's the craziest things about money. We constantly make up new money. Banks literally issue debt out of thin air. The governments, they print money when they need to. Pursuing money for its own ends is a fool's errand. I can tell you from having friends who have sold their companies for hundreds of millions of dollars, you can have hundreds of millions of dollars and still be miserable. The idea that money's gonna make you happy is absolutely crazy. It's like saying having lots and lots of ingredients in your cupboard will make you happy. It's the joy of cooking that makes you happy. Now with that said, life gets totally easier with money. Let me be really, really clear. Your time is precious, and when you've got money, you can free up your time to do more of the things that you want. You can have a cleaner who comes in and cleans the house. Instead of driving yourself, you can jump in the back of an Uber and make a few important phone calls. If you get a great business idea and you've got money and you can take two weeks off to explore that, fantastic.
The beauty of having some money is really the ability to control your time in a new way. A lot of people don't understand the value of actually having money. They think money is just for spending. There is a value that comes from having money. There is a value that comes from having three months' worth of living expenses in a savings account. There's a value that comes from having money that is separate to what you're doing with your business or career. The value of that is the freedom that it gives your mind to think big out. What you're buying with money is mental freedom, time freedom,
and creative freedom. So you need to start accumulating some money so that you get that level of freedom. It's the enjoyment of running a business, growing a career, building a network, traveling through life with the right people, those are the things that are actually real. Do not let people lure you away from the real stuff with the fake stuff. When you discover that your time is real, your experience is real, and money is fake, then the whole game shifts. If you're trading your time and your passion and your creative energy
in exchange for this fake made up stuff, then you're losing the game. The next one is the truth about failure and success.
All failure and all success give you nothing more than stories and data. And once they've happened, it's how you tell the story and how you interpret the data. I've had massive failures, but I've remained positive because I've said, well, you know what? I've got new data, and I've got new stories to tell. I've had huge successes. I've said, that's interesting. I've got some new stories, and I've got some new data to share. When you start seeing success and failure as the same thing, that it's just stories and data, you realize that everything's just an experience, and you get to be the storyteller about how that experience impacted you. You get to be the one who sees that all experiences are part of your mountain of value. Your high points, your low points, your triumphs, your disasters,
they are all stories, they're all data. It's all part of the ingredients for what you do next. I have seen people who have failed dramatically,
and then they've gone on to succeed wildly
because they took the story and they took the data. I've seen people succeed massively, and then they've been miserable because of the story that they took from that. Now you may be slow to learn this, but you will come to know that you will learn more from your failures than your successes. Me, personally, I had a boom then a bust, then a boom then a bust, then a boom then a bust. I had fifteen years of becoming a millionaire and losing it and becoming a millionaire and losing it and becoming a millionaire and losing it, and actually,
that's why I succeeded really big after that. Because all of those stories and all of that data informed
really good decisions after those facts. I really learned about how the world worked. I never lost trust in the fact that I would eventually succeed. There must be something really valuable that I need to learn here that will really help me make it big later on down the track. I haven't actually learned that much from wild success. Wild success is a really poor teacher. Failure, a good slap around the chops,
unbelievable lessons. Here's the harsh truth. Work life balance is mostly an illusion. There is a season to work hard at the exclusion of other things. There is a season to prioritize your health and wellness at the expense of your career. There is a season where you should go all in on your friendships, and a season where money really, really matters. And you need to pick what is the main focus that is gonna dominate a lot of your time. Now here's the other thing that I would say to someone in their twenties, I'd say this to myself in my twenties, you don't have that many things to balance just yet. So work life balance should mostly be about work
and a few key friendships and a few key relationships.
So here's the harsh truth. By the time you get into your thirties and forties, you have to balance a lot. You're probably gonna be taking care of kids. You're probably gonna be taking care of parents.
You're probably going to be a responsible provider,
and a lot will fall on your shoulders. You need to build up to that. You need to be ready for that. In your twenties, if you can lay strong foundations around your work, your career, your money, around your health, your wellness, and especially around key relationships,
You are gonna set yourself up for a very easy game in your thirties and your forties. If you distract yourself by trying to have this perfect work life balance and you don't lay strong foundations, life gets pretty hard later on. Now the other thing I would say is life is long. You don't need to go to five star hotel in Mauritius. There will be plenty of time to do that in your forties or your fifties or your sixties or even your seventies. You don't have to cram everything into your twenties, but you do need to lay some strong foundations that set you up for your thirties and forties. Another harsh truth, you're not taking enough risks. You're not putting yourself into risky situations that could really pay off. See, we don't get taught how to evaluate risk in high school. We get taught that starting a business would be risking it, having a career is safe. But at the moment, we live in a time of asymmetric risk, where starting a business could cost you a few thousand but make you millions. Having a career could give you a few thousand a month but cost you your ability to start a business. In your twenties, you typically don't have little kids that you have to provide for. You could take a risk. You could end up sleeping on a friend's couch, and it wouldn't be the end of the world. What does taking a risk really look like? It looks like talking to that person that you're romantically attracted to and asking them out on a date. It looks like starting that business and seeing how it works out. It looks like jumping on that plane and attending that conference even though it kinda puts you out of your comfort zone. Talking to that investor and seeing if they're willing to put some investment behind your big idea. Going along to a networking event where people are older than you and wealthier than you and more experienced than you, and you feel totally out of your depth, But that's the place that you're gonna get the mentor or the breakthrough. Your risk profile changes as you age. My decisions now, they impact my whole family. They impact my kids. They impact my parents. They impact my siblings. They impact my friendship groups. If I'm too reckless right now, it's not just me that's gonna end up sleeping on a couch, it's gonna be my whole family who have to find a place to stay. Recently, I did something stupid. I jumped on a skateboard, I fell off, and I broke my wrist. There was no upside for doing this and a huge downside for getting it wrong. And as a result, I've put pressure on my wife where I'm not able to help out around the house in the same way that I was while I'm healing. It was a dumb, silly mistake. Now that's the type of thing in my teens and twenties that didn't impact anyone else's life. A broken arm in my forties affects my whole household. Also, in your forties, if you do something stupid with your reputation,
it's very, very hard to get that back. No one really cares what you do in your twenties. You can do all sorts of dumb stuff. You can fall flat on your face a dozen times, and people say, well, it's great that you're trying things. It's great that you're learning. Once you get into your forties, if you fall flat on your face a dozen times, they say, well, this person's probably not gonna achieve very much. So harness your twenties as a time where you can take more risks. Bones are gonna heal. Businesses are gonna bounce back. Your career is not gonna be damaged by a silly decision.
Right? Enjoy your twenties. Take some risks. Oh, this one makes me emotional.
The final lesson is a big picture lesson. What do I think life is about? What do I think success is about? Life and success is about finding really great people and traveling through life together. Isn't it an incredibly weird thing? We are on a rock hurdling through space orbiting a massive pool of fire. We're here for a split second of time.
We get to travel through life. We get to travel through space with a small group of people who matter. There will come a day where you will get a phone call that one of those people has passed. There will also come a day where some of the things that you took for granted go away.
You just can't run as fast as you once could run. You can't get through that HIIT training class the way you used to be able to get through it. You can't lift that weight that you thought you could lift. You turn up at a party and you suddenly feel like, hey, I'm the oldest person at this party. I feel out of it. Life has a funny, unfair little way of just sneaking up on you. One day you look at your parents, and suddenly they do actually look old.
One by one, your grandparents go. The thing that I'm most proud of is traveling through life with some great people.
My cofounder, I met at 14, and we're still running businesses today.
I've got people on my team that I've known since I was 10 years old. I've gotten to a point now where I've got friends in my life who have been there for thirty years plus. Few people talk about these achievements. On Instagram and YouTube, you'll often hear about cars and apartments and houses and travel.
You won't hear about the achievement
of comforting a friend when their parent goes through a stroke.
It's rare to hear someone talk about what it feels like to comfort a friend through a divorce, and that stuff's gonna happen. Checking into a big fancy hotel,
that's cool.
Checking out, you forget it pretty quickly.
When you look back on twenty or thirty years, being there in a hospital with someone,
that feels like a real achievement. What I'd say to young Dan is that you're excited about these huge achievements,
like multimillion revenue,
being told that your company is worth a lot of money, being able to jump on a plane and go to an incredible holiday. What you probably don't realize when you're when you're 20 is that the big achievements
will be hanging out with people during ups and downs,
being there when a parent or a loved one has to go in the hospital,
speaking at your grandparents' funeral. And even if you achieve all the big stuff that goes on Instagram, some of your biggest regrets will be not jumping on the plane and being at your friend's wedding. It'll be not being there when your grandparent went into a nursing home. The stuff that we think of as peak experience is actually pretty meaningless, and the stuff that really does offer peak experience doesn't make Instagram. But if I was to sum up this lesson, it would be to spend a little bit of time on a rock around the sun with a small group of people that truly matter.
Don't overlook that.