Lessons - The Power-Ups That Built My Empire | Eric Siu - Author of Leveling Up (Worked with Amazon & Uber)

In this lessons episode, explore how cultivating habits and mental models can serve as powerful tools for success. Discover why iteration often outperforms the pursuit of pure originality, understand how adopting an apprentice mentality fosters growth and resilience, and uncover how endurance and mindset shape the ability to navigate setbacks and achieve lasting results. Let's break down some of the lessons that you've learned over your career that you speak about in this book and there's a few that I can't remember. There's 15 different chapters and there's a whole and there's like a lesson per chapter. So for the value of people listening, pick your favorite ones that you want to speak on. I don't know which ones you'd like to touch on but I'm sure there's a few favorites that you love and we can go into those and unpack what those are and how those can help you succeed. Yeah, totally. So there's 15 power-ups in the book and power-ups to me are again like I mentioned. There are either habits that you cultivate or mental models such as understanding things like second-order consequences and things like that. There are different tools that you can go around collecting just like you would in the gaming world. Now, I talk about 15 in the book. It's just a very beginning. There's a lot more than 15 power-ups in the world and you have to, there's positive power-ups and there's negative power-ups, right? If you eat too much fast food, then you end up, you know, your body goes in a different direction, right? And so one of the chapters is titled Thevery. And I think there's a there's a lot of cognitive dissonance around it because us as human beings, we like to think I'm original, right? We hold this thing to be very sacred. And I think it's important to understand that even Apple, the most valuable company in the world, you know, when Steve Jobs came out with the mouse and the graphical user interface, guess who he stole it from? He stole it from Xerox, right? And so he even him, he said in life, everything is just a remix. And when you think about SpaceX and Elon Musk's rockets coming back to Earth, the rocket design is still fundamentally the same foundational design as from the 50s or the 60s, right? The big difference is they come back to Earth. And so, you know, Picasso himself has said that, you know, everything in life, I mean, great artists steal, right? And so it's like, oh my god, I don't want to steal, I don't want to be a thief, but like reality is those of you listening to this podcast right now, you're trying to get at least one nugget from it and you're trying to apply it to your life. And so life is just, you're going around collecting all these nuggets and then maybe you're making a 10 to 30% iteration, right? Like that iteration for bringing the rocket back to Earth, that's a massive iteration, right? It's not easy to do by any means, but he had to combine, you know, Elon and his entire team had to think about, okay, you know, what are all the dynamics that are at play and how can we make this work, right? So there's a game within itself there. So my point is, you know, I think the sooner people let go of the pressure of having it be completely original, the easier it's going to be for people to kind of move on and make the best version of themselves, which is in itself, you know, very original. We're all original, we're all kind of one of one. Yeah, and I would say that to constantly think that the things that we have to do in life or take to market or like, let's look at it from an entrepreneurship lens, if you want to, if you want to do something that's slightly outside of whatever your nine to five is or if you already are trying to take a product to market, there's sort of two ways you can go about it, right? You can go for that blue ocean where you're taking something to market that's never, ever been done before or you can just iterate in an existing market and be wildly successful. So there's something to be said for not making life harder than it has to be for you either, right? And you'll still be successful, you'll still be revered and you'll still be like, you're not, you're not, like you said, not thieving in a bad way, but just iterating on what people have already done. And I think that's something that also probably lends a little bit of insight to your apprentice mentality, learning from others as well. It's not obviously in the same context, not thieving, but it's not like just learning and iterating, but it's also making sure that you don't have to go through all the failures and that other people have already learned from, right? Yep, totally. I mean, so it's, you know, the apprentice mentality is really just, you know, understanding that you're never going to be too high on yourself or never going to be too low on yourself. It's understanding that, you know, you can have strong views, but you should just hold them very weekly. And if you're presented with new data and new information to be ready to adjust on the fly, because the more ego that you develop, the more, the more you're going to be stuck in your ways, but the world's evolving so quickly, especially with all the stuff we see, with technology. So it's, so apprentice, apprentice mentality, I don't want to get it twisted. So it's not, it's not just you going out towards and going finding mentors and getting people to help you out. It's truly, I understand what you're saying now. So it's, it's just having this, this humble, this humble persona that allows you to accept learnings from other people, right? It's more than just finding mentors. Okay. Okay. I mean, like, you know, when I, so for example, I've been hanging out a lot in clubhouse, but when I, when I go into the rooms, you know, I try to listen and I try to be the, the idiot in the room, right? So when I approach things from an idiot, kind of a, or apprentice, I'm not going to say, you know, apprentice are idiots, but like I'll take it even further, right? I'll use an extreme word to say, Oh, look, I'm not so smart. I have a lot to learn. But, you know, sometimes I'll see people join the room and there's a lot of bravado, there's a lot of ego, and you can tell they're closed off to listening, they're closed off to learning. It's, it's my way or the highway. In some cases, they might be large influencers. And, you know, but, you know, they haven't learned to kind of a, maybe they might have had the apprentice mentality at one point, but they haven't dialed it back and, and kept that habit going, right? They haven't cultivated or, or more so, refresh that habit over and over. Yeah. And, and that, I think that the most successful people, at least the people that I've found in my life that are the most successful that could be worth multi-million, or billion dollar plus in total net worth, those are the people, like when you do speak to them when they constantly have successes and wins, you can see that the second they implant themselves into into a group that they immediately just like they just want as much information as possible. And I think that the people you're speaking about, I think it's probably a little bit more prolific on clubhouse just because if clubhouse in some of the rooms, not all of them, on some of them, and I know you're like, I watch all your stuff, I follow you on social. You're always on clubhouse, always speaking about clubhouse. I think that there's a lot of people that kind of flex on clubhouse a little bit more than they should. And that doesn't help anybody, right? It's, you know, it's not going to, it's not going to help them, but I think they put a ceiling on their success 100% because I mean, yeah, I love sharing the numbers, right? You know, when I'm in clubhouse, but I don't do it to flex and I always try to preface that like this is not to brag. This is just saying, hey, this is what's possible, but it also takes this amount of time to get there. So I come from a position of trying to be transparent, but teaching as well, but I think to your point, when you're just flexing about, oh, you have, you know, you bought this company, this public brand over here, and then you took this company public or whatever, you know, how helpful is that really? Or are you just, is that more ego than anything? Like, how helpful is that generally? It's not going to help many people who want to do something more with their life, or you know, start a sidehouse. So like they're not, most people are not trying to take a company public. Most people are just trying to do better at what they're doing, right? They, you know, maybe IPOing is a plan for some, but I think the majority of people would learn more from a chat with you than somebody who just lists off the company to take in public, or, you know, the success they've achieved is great. It provides credibility, but it doesn't actually offer tactical or tangible insight or lessons that somebody can take away, right? Like you mentioned that nugget. People list no podcasts. They want to nugget. They want to, they can take away and they can do tomorrow, really. If you just keep flexing, it's not going to help anybody. And I think that that's something that those, you know, it's almost like those are the people, even if they have had success. I prefer not to learn from them just because I know that where their heads at, where their minds at, is not in the place where they're going to accept other points of view, accept other opinions. And actually, it's funny because you see people that were wildly, wildly successful, you know, the monetarily successful or what otherwise. And over the past 20 years, they become irrelevant, right? Those are the people that just, they, they had success and they became completely irrelevant because I think they never had this. I've never heard of frame this way, but apprentice mentality. That's a very, very, very smart point. Now these, these, these, these level ups, these, these powerups are these mindsets or are some of them actual behavioral items or like daily routine items that you can, that you can do to sort of accomplish that 1% day over day. Yeah, some of it is, is mindset. So we have one on endurance, right? So that's really, you know, how much pain can you take because any level of success you're hoping to achieve, you know, pain is a prerequisite, right? I think people tend to run away from the pain, but reframe your mind into running towards it and getting through it, right? You know, there's a lot of people like when you're thinking about starting a new business or whatever, you know, you go through imposter syndrome, that's part of, you have to endure that. There's the startup, the startup kind of, you know, that one or two or three years that it takes to get things going, right? Just things don't work out the right way initially. Things don't go as planned. Maybe some type of pandemic hits like just things don't work out, right? But it's you have to learn to endure. And so I learned a lot of that from poker, having to endure, like sometimes you have swings where you lose for could be three, six, 12 months at a time and you just have to learn to deal with it and then be patient and choose how you how you react to that, right? So some of its mindset, some of it would be, you know, habits, but, you know, it's what they say, the cliche you hear over and over is, you know, oh, it's all about mindset at the end of it that you hear from a lot of kind of self-development people. And it's actually true. It's how you're programmed at the end of the day. That's how I like to think of it. You know, what type of information are you consuming? And that's really going to program you. That's going to guide you. Who are you hanging out with, right? That is your programming, and that's going to say how you decide to do things in the future. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.