Lessons - $100M Across 16 Businesses by Doing the One Thing Nobody Teaches You | Mike Zeller - Entrepreneur Mentor & Forbes Contributor

In this lessons episode, explore how identifying a personal zone of genius creates the foundation for lasting business success. Discover why strategic positioning matters more than hard work alone. Learn how focusing on high-value decisions can create exponential results and uncover why self-leadership and clarity are the first steps toward building an extraordinary career in life. So it comes back to what gives you energy. So all these areas, these are not mutually exclusive. They all basically create just a really healthy, strong persona that you are self-aware of, that you can sort of take into and that sort of brings me to my next question. How do you build the business knowing your zone of genius that is built on these four key areas? Because that must be the best. That's why they hire you, right? But also, look at people who do extraordinary things. What's in common with them? They put themselves in extraordinarily right positions. Are you a sports fan? Yeah, it depends on sports though. I'm more hockey than football, but I don't mind the Steelers. They're okay. My hockey team, none of my hockey teams have won the long time because I'm Canadian, so it doesn't matter. Sure, you guys have had a suffering out. But the Toronto Raptors, you mentioned earlier from Toronto, right? Well, a few years ago, they won the NBA championship. So how did they win the NBA championship? Quite Leonard. He was in the right position, right time. Warriors get injured. Clay Thompson and Kevin Durant go down. They're hobbled. Extraordinary results come from people putting themselves in. Extraordinary the right opportunities with. So if you look and business, Richard Branson hits the timing right. Amazon hits the timing right with riding the wave of the internet. They were the, you know, they want to be, they just want to sell books initially. Now, Bezos had a bigger vision, but we've at the time, people were afraid of buying things online when Amazon started. Now, we're like, no big deal, buy whatever you want online. So you have to think, am I riding the right wave? Some of us have been right. I realized I was riding some waves that were dying. Like, I was in a socially minded car dealership. That was a dinosaur industry. If you look at the diffusion of innovations, what is it a laggard business? Is it, you know, late majority? Is it about to go out of business? Or the industry is about to be majorly disrupted? Do I want to be a just, do I want to be the disrupted? Or do I want to be the disruptor? So now, you know, part of the reason I'm in the thought later space. Hey, that's an early stage venture still. And there's a lot of innovation and a lot of opportunities within that. Biohacking, I'm launching new biohacking venture because that industry is going to go from a $12 billion dollar industry to a $54 billion industry from 2019 to 2027. So I'm jumping into that space. And I'm doing it in a way that I'm aligned with my genius. I get to create. I get to architect the business and I get to put people in their zones of genius and attract people that I'm attracting a dream team. I know I'm not a great operating partner. So this time I'm not freaking starting the business without a great operating partner. No, you so I love this. So what the last thing I wanted to touch on, and I think it's just interesting because you mentioned, you mentioned a good point. Like, so you know what your zone of genius is, you, you want to be, you know, like you have certain industries that you can disrupt so that you're, you're not, you don't want, you want to be disrupted, not disrupted. And that's sort of where you position yourself. One thing that you've spoke about before is a $10,000 per hour activity. So my question, I think that's an interesting point because just even like just saying it just sounds like a funny, just like a funny sentence. So it's somebody who wants to, somebody who wants to start a non-service based business. Because I can understand as a coach, if you want to be a coach, this makes a lot of sense. You're trying to up your billables and you have to create more value. And these are, and there's things you can do to up your value when you position yourself to your customers. But this is more like a mindset I find than just like a truly $10,000 per hour activity. So what does that actually mean for somebody who is somebody who wants to start a dog walking business? Somebody wants to start a software or a SaaS business? What does that actually mean? And how do you find that? So most of us come from a middle class mindset. What's a middle class mindset? Hey, if you want a job done right, do it yourself. That's a middle class mindset. Billionaire mindset. If you want a job done right, what's a billionaire do, Scott? Pay someone else to do it. You find the best person to do it for you. Yeah. Exactly. Find the best person to do it for you. Because the billionaire knows that what the biggest amount of value that he creates is smart decisions. Strategic decisions. Bezos, Jeff Bezos, and I listen to this great podcast series about Amazon versus Walmart. And on it, it said that Bezos has one goal every day to make two smart strategic decisions. So that's his goal. He's not trying to do things. He's trying to decide things. So $10,000 per hour activities. They are not the doing of things, even the very best attorneys in the world, maybe get $500 to $1,000 an hour for billable hours. So your income is kept there. When I was in real estate, I calculated that my average hour, if I was setting up the deal and would spend one hour with a potential client, get them on board as a client, hand them off to one of my junior agents to work with them and close the deal. That was a $5,000 an hour activity. That's what I would average. That's still limited, right? And $1,000 an hour activities are massive strategic positioning, offer decisions, leadership decisions. Sometimes it's who you hire, who you bring on as a partner. It's your offer. If you craft and ears, this will offer that goes at gangbusters. Cool thing about business. If I hit in baseball, I played college baseball. If I hit a grand slam, the most runs I can score is four. In business, if I hit a grand slam, I can score 1,000 runs from that. Right? Now, I might craft an offer. This is where maturity comes into play too. I got to know that nine out of ten offers are probably going to strike out or not do that great. But if I get to that 10th offer and I keep learning and kicking butt, man, I could do, I could hit a massive home run and get that $10,000 an hour activity. So $10,000 an hour activities are usually longer term strategic elements than the the short term ones. So I'm glad that I clarified that. So it's nothing to do with how you, of course, it's great to increase your own value if you want to bring value to the world. But it is, I love that. Bezos analogy. Make one, two, whatever, however many, super strategic decisions, they'll move the needle and then the aggregate of that over five years, 10 years. Well, it could be $100,000 per hour activity at that point. There's no limit on that. Yeah. And so let's think about it like this too. I have friends that charge you know, $25,000 for speech. So what is, you know, they step on stage for an hour, that's $25,000 an hour. But how did they get to that $25,000 an hour activity? Oh, they had to write a book or they had to do these other business things. Now we're writing a book. Do they have to write every single word and design the cover and proofread and all that? No, they can outsource that to $20, $50, $100, an hour type team members. But then that book positions them to get a $25,000 an hour activity. Understood. It makes sense. If you, like, so if you had like imparting words of wisdom, it could be from your book. Because what I want to do, I want to do a couple of rapid fire at the end, just pull it some insight and partying words of wisdom for young entrepreneurs from your book or just, you know, from your life experience. What would those final thoughts be if somebody wants to start their own business, move, you know, upskill, new job, new promotion, just level up in life? Yeah. So in my book, Genius Within, I broke down a lot of these things that we've been talking about, including the $10,000 an hour activities. And when you have, know your genius, where you're one of the best in the world at, like, man, I, you know, Michael Jordan put in his name on Jordan sneakers. That did really well. Didn't do bad at all. I'm wearing Jordan still because his name, right? And the brand is great. So you figure out your zone of genius, you leverage your zone of genius, be very, very intentional about it. Most of us are happy. Most of us don't have enough clarity about our zone of genius. That's what's the first domino default. You got five C's. And the first C is clarity. If you get more clarity, that's what you're going to show up with more confidence. If I show up with more confidence, guess what I'm going to show up with? Also more courage. And because of the greater courage that I show up with, I'm also going to lead and, and make decisions and act with greater conviction. And then when I have greater conviction, my commitment level is going to rise. But the first domino default, the first C is clarity. That's what Socrates said, to know thyself is the beginning of all wisdom, to know thyself is the beginning of all wisdom. So you want to be a great leader, and want to build a great business, know yourself, know yourself better than anyone else, because then you can put yourself in extraordinarily right positions. So go back to another guy, one of the oldest guys I've ever talked to, but still bright and brilliant. Dehawk. Do you know who Dehawk is? I actually don't know. You mentioned a couple that I know. I know Drugger, but I don't know who Dehawk is. Yeah. Most people don't know him, but, but most have used one of his products. Do you have a visa card? I do. All right. So he's the creator of visa. Really? Founder visa. Yeah. So I talked to him last year. He was 98 years old at the time. He founded a little company called visa as an visa credit cards. And after he retired and sold his equity in visa, he started writing for Harvard and writing for all these other publications about leadership. And one of the things he found over and over and over again with the very best leaders in the world, they did something that ordinary leaders did not do, which was they focused more than 50% of their leadership energy on leading themselves. So we think of, oh, where's my best leadership energy? Leading others, leading up, leading down, leading sideways. Nope. Leading myself, emotional leadership, put myself in emotional, self-management, self-management, studying myself, put myself in the right position, leading my company in the right way, having that self-reflective moments. That's what the best people in the world do. Tom Brady goes to Tampa Bay, wins the Super Bowl first year with no training camp. COVID, pandemic, new team, new playbook, everything's going wrong. And they suffer. He screws up a couple of times in a public way. And I can't get in sync, right? But then they have a by-week last year. The by-weeking gets everybody right. And he had enough determination, enough confidence, enough self-leadership that he's like, we'll figure this out, guys. We will. And they did. So self-leadership.