Lessons - Problem-Solving For Entrepreneurs | John Assaraf - Founder & CEO of NeuroGym

think this is an interesting point because you've gone into, you've built five businesses and I'm sure that, you know, that's not, that's not counting the fact that if you make, or you write a best-selling book, I consider that a business editor of itself, like, and if you do all the other things you've done in your career, you've done a lot of things successfully in a very diverse, and very diversified industries and categories. Now, when I'm sure you now apply that mindset to quite literally everything you do in your life because you recognize it, it works, but I want to understand how you can take that mindset in, I guess my opinion would be at the time of very low-risk situation, but when you start to apply to more high-risk situations, I feel like a little bit more fear or practicality or you reasoning or lodgicking with yourself when you have to make decisions that if I, for example, stop this job and start something new, I can't pay rent, my kids, my family, all these different things that are now weighing on you that you didn't have when you're 19. Things that people that are listening to this are probably dealing with in their next career move, in their starting their own side hustle or their business. You've navigated that, I want to understand how to do that at scale, or when there's more risk involved. Yeah, and listen, I've coached, you know, over 10,000 business owners, everything from startup to a billion dollars from startup. So, I'm familiar with all of the phases, you know, I've also grown my own companies to the point where my remax region had 85 offices and 1200 agents doing 4.5 billion a year in sales, but we didn't start off with that. You know, Bamboo, we had, we raised $28 million, we went from zero startup, six of us, to a thousand employees, and less than a year raised a bunch of money that took it public on that. So, I know the gamut. So, think of it maybe a little bit differently. If you're inexperienced, let's say at diving, you don't go to a hundred foot cliff and dive off, because the risk of getting hurt is really, really big, right? But if you want to learn how to dive, you jump off the side of the pool first, then you get on the small diving board, maybe you jump off and you jump off five times, ten times, twenty times, thirty times, and you go, okay, you know, I know how to do this. I know how to balance. I know how to, where to put my arms. I know, you know, to close my feet. I know how to do that. Then I can go higher and higher and higher and higher. Well, what causes fear, you know, at one level does not cause fear at the next level and vice versa as you go up. So, we get accustomed to taking fear, to taking calculated risk based on experience. So, when somebody has a job and they're thinking of leaving their job, for example, and starting their own business, what actually triggers the fear circuit in the brain is a behavioral neuroscience researcher. I study the cause of thoughts, the cause of emotions, the cause of behaviors or the lack of taking action. So, whenever the fear circuit is activated, the question is, what is causing it to activate? So, if we are looking to do something we've never done before, without any training, without any skills in doing that, then our brain is going to activate the fear circuit because there is danger that is possible. So, what happens is most people don't have a problem that relates to their fear circuit. They have a problem because they don't know how to manage the emotion called fear. So, it drives them or prevents them versus fueling them. So, the first thing we have to understand is in order to achieve goals, we have to have the vision of the goal, what the outcome that we want is. We want to have some goals to get along the way, but then we want to ask ourselves a question is, you know, what are the strategies that we can implement that pretty much guarantees our success? Now, in the absence of knowing what the strategies are and the tactics are, then we have fear. We have doubt. We have uncertainty. And we are biologically wired to move away from that, not towards it. Why? Well, safety and survival of the number one responsibilities of our brain, avoidance of pain or discomforts, number two, conservation of energies, number three, and then number four is gaining pleasure. So, if we don't know how to mitigate, how to feel fear, doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, and navigate through that, then we are victims of our emotions. So, now we're dealing with an ignorance problem, not an ability problem. Ignorance just means not knowing. So, when the average person says, I want to, you know, I want to achieve this. I want to get to that next level of success. I always like to use Rubik's Cubes as an example. So, let me, let me bring you something. Hey, two seconds. Let's do it. I'll do it. So, give me an example. Let's say, or if I asked ever, have you ever tried to solve the Rubik's Cube? 95% people say, yeah, I've tried to solve it. And when I asked how many people have actually solved it, like one or two or three percent have actually solved the Rubik's Cube. Now, here's a question for you. If you wanted to solve the two by two Rubik's Cube, could you hop on to YouTube right now and in less than five minutes solve this? A thousand percent. Yeah. Well, what if you said, I want to solve the three by three? Could I go into YouTube and solve that? I would assume. I would say yes, too. Yeah. Let's say you have grander, bigger goals. And you want to solve the four by four. Is the how to solve this based on the algorithms to solve this and this? Is it available? Yeah. I would start this, so I feel like there's going to be one where people don't make videos about it. But yeah, I think that most of the stuff is solvable. Okay. The monster. What's that? This is a Rubik's Cube. But this one is like, this will take you 24 hours to do, right? So the point I want to make is think about this for just a moment. Let's let's get perspective on success. If you want to release 50 pounds of fat and keep it off, do we know how to do that in 2022? Yes. Yeah. If you want to build a business to a million or five or ten or a hundred million, do we know how to do that? Yes. You may not, but does somebody know how to do it? Yes. If you want to improve your relationship, do we know how to do that? If you want to have a deeper spiritual connectedness, do we know how to do that? If you want to do anything in health, wealth, relations, career, or business, all the how-to exists. Unless you're trying to colonize Mars, all of the how-to exists. So the problem isn't that the how-to doesn't exist. Problem one, you don't know how to. Problem two, you haven't committed to. Because if you were committed to the vision and the goals you have, then you would find the book, the video, the course, the coach, the mentor, the team, the partnership that is capable of achieving that goal, but it doesn't happen unless you are committed. So when people say, you know, I want to leave my job and start a business, or I want to grow my business from 200 or 500 million to 10. First question I ask all of my students is, are you interested in you committed? Because if you're interested, go somewhere else. If you're committed, I'll show you how. And when we start off with using our 100 billion dollar bio computer, the right way, every single brain's got functionally works the same. Every brain works the same. Now, there are some people that either through training or through, you know, being in the right environment, learned how to use their brain the right way. And there's others that are victims of their conditioning, their past, their way of thinking, their lack of the most personal. I think a lot of them, that's the majority, right? The majority of people go through life, I was actually watching a podcast with Tony Robbins the other day and he was speaking about every morning, you know, the thoughts that you think when you wake up, you think they're your own, but they're not really your own. You have to prime and you have to understand like what is actually a priority for you versus what the world is making you think is your priority. Well, the world and your conditioning, right? And then the repetitive, like there's a huge difference between thoughts, which we have 6200 of a day on average and thinking. The average person, if they said what they were thinking, they would be speechless. Because most people don't think. Most people have thoughts and they confuse that for thinking. So if you ask yourself, like, what, why am I afraid? What am I afraid might happen? What's the worst that can happen? How can I mitigate that from happening? Is there somebody? Is there a process? Is there a system? Is there a coach? Is there a consultant? Is there a friend? Is there somebody that can help me reduce the risk of that happening that I'm afraid of? And of course there is, but you don't find the solution when you're focusing on the problem or the fear. I love that. I want to, can you? I've heard you speak to this before and I find it fascinating. The evolution of the human brain. So can you, can you just give a, you don't have to go like into super death, but I think it's important to understand, people want to understand why they function the way they function, why they think the way they think towards certain things and that all has to do with the evolution of the human brain, the reptilian brain, all the way through to the mammalian brain. So can you give a description of that and maybe a summary of that explanation of that as people understand? Yeah, and I always like to have my friends. So listen, if you were to her moment for those who are watching, if you were to take my hair away, my skin away, and even my skull away, and you were to think about what am I really talking to, right? You're talking to this. You're talking to an organism, a three pound, you know, piece of matter that's made up of mostly fat and amino acids and water coalesced into, you know, into this thing called a brain that evolved in in three distinct layers, the extinct, instinctual part of the brain made up of probably, you know, our brain stem, that is therefore instinct for survival and safety. Then as we evolved as a species starting 200,000 years ago or so, you know, with having more proteins and more food that we can cook to have more calories, the next layer of the brain evolved called the mammalian brain or the limbic system, which allows us to have, you know, deeper sense of emotions and love and care and sadness. And then as our brains evolved, we developed the Neocortex, the top layer of the brain, which is comprised of, you know, what I call is the Einstein brain, which is over there, and the Frankenstein's monster brain, which is up there. And the Einstein part of our brain is our CEO, the executive director, the imagination side of our brain, that can help us choose what we want and why we want it and how to develop the strategies and the tactics and the tools and the resources and timelines to do that. But there's another part of our brain, right? The Frankenstein's monster part of our brain that evolved to say, you know, what if you fail? What if you're embarrassed? What if you lose money? What if you make a mistake? What if your children suffer, your husband suffer, your wife suffers? What if you suffer? What if you disappoint yourself? What if you're rejected? What if you're not loved? So we have almost this like gas and break part to our brain, that for the most part, most people don't know how to use. And so our brain's number one focus is survival and safety. First, second is avoidance, move away from behaviors and move away from emotions of things that are distasteful, things that disgust us, things that might hurt us, and whether it's real or imagined, our brain doesn't care. It's a signal that gets popped up. Then our brain says, listen, because of one and two, we need to do that with the 25% of the calories that we're getting a day from food. And we need to make this an energy conservation system. So we're going to be a miser based on the past. And we're going to my brain and your brain focuses on predicting the future based on the past. And so what happens is if we've had trauma in the past, if we've had failures in the past, if we've been disappointed or embarrassed or ashamed in the past because we try something and we fail, then our brain says, move away from that because there's a risk here.