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