3 Underdog Stories That’ll Get You Inspired This Week

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
In most areas of life, you shouldn't be hoping for the miraculous save, right? The one thing that's going to turn your business around, or the person who's going to meet you and just give you that opportunity, just hand it to you. But there is an exception.

**Shaan Puri** (0:22)
All right, Shaan, I want to make you feel good. I want to make the world feel good. I saw an inspirational story this weekend, and I want to share it with you. It's going to involve some audio, and it involves pop culture, which you don't know anything about. I think that some of our listeners might know about the story, but I think it'll be particularly cool for you. All right. There's this singer-songwriter guy I love. His name is Noah Khan. Have you heard of Noah Khan?

**Sam Parr** (0:47)
Noah Khan. I can't say I have.

**Shaan Puri** (0:50)
He describes himself as the Jewish Ed Sheeran. He's a good songwriter, he's a great singer, but he's got a little folk in his sound, almost like Mumford and Sons meets Ed Sheeran, but based out of Vermont. Do you know anything about New England folk music?

**Sam Parr** (1:08)
Yeah. I'm into that kind of music actually.

**Shaan Puri** (1:10)
He graduated high school and decided not to go to college and was able to get a small record deal. The record deal, it was only okay. That sounds like a big deal, but you just barely get by, and they're almost buying an option on you that you're going to be a big deal. He has a couple of songs that are hits. I think one time he got to go on the Stephen Colbert Show and play one of his songs. I mean, that's pretty awesome, but if that's all you're known for is doing it one time, you're still like, shit, I got to go get a job. I'm not sure if this is going to work. The pandemic hits. He's living in LA at the time trying to make it big, but he's like, shit, what am I going to do? I guess I'll just go back home to Vermont where my parents live and I have a little bit more space. He gets depressed where he's like eating bad food and smoking weed all day. He's like, what the hell am I going to do with my career? I can't go out and play like I'm a nobody right now. What am I going to do? He's like, well, TikTok, I guess seems neat. Let's try that. He starts posting some of his songs on TikTok. A few of them do okay. I think he gets 50,000 followers or something like that. Again, it's like a mediocre success. But then one night, he comes up, it took some 20 minutes and he writes a verse to a song.
All right, so this is just a 22nd video that he posts on TikTok. It's good, but he posts it, and like two or three hours later, like no one replies. He's like, this sucks. I'm just gonna delete this thing, but let me finish kind of getting high because he said he was eating edible when he posted this. He's like, let me finish getting high. He ends up passing out and sleeps through the night, and he wakes up and this video gets like 200,000 likes and like 100,000 comments. And he's like, shit, I better finish this song and actually complete this song because it sounds like people like this verse. Now, he plays the rest of the song and you could actually see the full song that he plays.
All right, so this all happened in about 2021 So he finishes that song, it blows up. Now, this guy's from New England. Last week, he sold out Fenway Park, the stadium, for like, you know, whatever, 50,000 people. So he writes that song, he puts it out, it blows up, it goes viral. The guy, in a matter of three years, goes from just a dude in his parents' house, playing on TikTok, posting a verse of a song, and what's funny is that in 2019, right when he was doing this, he tweeted out, he goes, I'm probably not going to ever sell out Madison Square Garden. In fact, I'm probably not even going to sell all the shows that I have for this tour. But as long as you'll have me, I'll keep writing some songs. He played Fenway Park and sold it out. Actually, a few days ago, he sold out Madison Square Garden three nights in a row. I wanted to share this story with you because it makes me feel awesome. It also shows that if you put your shit out there, this is what the Internet's for. If you put your stuff out there, even if it's incomplete, people love seeing progress.