How I Learned to Grow
[Applause]
california’s redwood trees
reach heights of nearly 400 feet
the equivalent of a 37 story building
while the average maple tree will only
ever reach about 50 feet
both intake water nutrients co2
sunlight yet there’s an incredible
disconnect
between the heights they achieve i want
you to take a minute to look at their
shape
the way they branch out the size and
thickness of their trunks
the way their roots grow their
foundation
the successful both trees and people
are t-shaped now we’re going to come
back just
in a minute but for now we’ll leave the
redwoods over here
i never thought i’d be an entrepreneur
at 16.
i also never thought i’d stop growing at
a 5'6
but i guess the world is just full of
surprises
the start of my journey was a dunkin
coffee run with my dad
it was three days before before i got my
license life was good
and for the past year i was told that i
get my dad’s car
so i had absolutely no reason to work i
had enough money for
lunch with friends and absolutely hated
the idea of working a nine to five
my first job was as a buster at this
local restaurant and it wasn’t
it was one of those restaurants that
didn’t actually need a buster so i would
just
awkwardly pace around the room for eight
hours looking for something to do
apparently there’s only so many times
you can refill a salt shaker
and as we’re pulling up to the
drive-through my dad asked me what i’m
gonna do when i get my license because i
have nothing to drive
me confidently says your audi
he also very confidently says no
but after a few hours of negotiating i
managed to get driving privileges until
i bought my own ride
and i figured if i was going to buy a
car i might as well get something nice
the goal was a jeep wrangler by june so
i could haul my friends and surfboards
to the beach for the summer
so 20 000 in 10 months
a seemingly impossible feat for a 16
year old
so i went out and created four sources
of income
i got two jobs started reselling on
craigslist and started an online
business
now where did i get the energy and drive
to go from
enjoying a relaxing summer with no
obligations or priorities to starting up
multiple sources of income
i actually don’t just have an unusual
amount of motivation i’m just as
addicted to tic toc as everyone else
see motivation is a very volatile thing
that’s
non-existent a good chunk of the time
simply put
i to upgrade myself and able to sustain
and upgrade in my income
i had to develop one of those root
skills
my why the reason
i was doing all this in the first place
at first it was a car
but as time went time went on it
developed in something much greater
as the ball began to roll and i started
to believe in my abilities there was
absolutely no reason to stop at a car
when the door was wide open and full of
possibilities
a why including yourself alone will only
get you so far
there’ll come a point when things get so
tough that your mind just compromises a
car
out of your scope of possibility but
when you set it to something greater
than yourself
it’d be selfish to quit for me i
imagined a future in which i can travel
the world with my friends and provide
for my family without ever having to
worry about finances or
working a nine-to-five time is our
greatest asset
and to spend it in the rat race away
from my family is the last thing i’d
want to do
money will come and go but for us
mortals
time is finite so my why morphants is
something that would give me sustainable
discipline to push through
when i didn’t have the motivation to so
back to business i would spend the early
days of the week delivering pizza
the second half of the week busting
tables the weekends reselling and
any second of free time on the online
business now i knew the real money maker
would be the online business so i tried
to focus on that
and after investing over fifteen hundred
dollars and hundreds of hours of my time
the results were life-changing
one sale for 26.96
with my outstanding results i was able
to go back to duncan and buy one more
coffee
and maple sugar bacon sandwich and get
right back to the drawing board
this is how my week was structured
everything was spread so
thin that hardly any of my hustles got
any true nurturing
or understanding i was
the maple tree my energy was
sporadically distributed to hundreds of
leaves and branches
and as a result they all suffered from a
nutrient deficit
the truth is any one of those could have
been used to achieve my goal
as confucius once said the man who
chases two rabbits
catches neither and needless to say
chasing four rabbits wasn’t bound to
produce any better results
to skyrocket success one must become
t-shaped
like the redwood a rock-solid foundation
to skyrocket a single branch to
groundbreaking heights
on one end we have a generalist
someone who’s capable of just about
everything but isn’t necessarily an
expert in anything
and on the other end we have a
specialist
someone who’s just good at one single
skill
the sweet spot is with the t-shape
a foundation coupled with an expertise
so i decided to pick something and run
with it i was scrolling through one of
those top 50 side hustles pages for the
18th time when i stumbled upon digital
marketing
now i’d already had a very good
understanding of how digital marketing
worked for my online business
in other words part of my foundation was
already set
so i dropped the rest of my hustles
printed some business cards and went out
the next day going door-to-door pitching
my services
i became an expert in just one thing
and poured all of my energy into
developing my craft
and while it didn’t happen overnight i
only started seeing payments come
through to my bank account when i
focused my energy
on one output i wouldn’t consider myself
successful in any objective sense but it
was a major step up from where i was
i was able to develop a why to push
through when it got tough and pour all
of my energy
into one output i set my foundation
and nurtured one branch and with that
my maple tree is slowly becoming a
redwood
while i might not own an audi or jeep
wrangler i now own a business at 17
and that’s pretty cool too thank you