Hard Work is Overrated: How Shaan Puri Built a Multi Million Dollar Podcast Empire

Shaan Puri (0:00)

The biggest risk you have is spending your life trying to do a really good job at the wrong thing. Biography is the real thing. For any person with high potential, because it'll sap you, sap your will, sap your time, sap your resources, sap your energy, sap your belief in yourself.

Wouter Teunissen (0:14)

This is Shaan Puri. He sold his company to Amazon and Twitch for millions, and he now runs one of the most successful business podcasts in the world with millions of listeners.

Shaan Puri (0:23)

I know this because I spent 10 years doing things only for like, ooh, if this worked, it'd be amazing. The work has to be the win.

Wouter Teunissen (0:30)

Yeah.

Shaan Puri (0:31)

The win can't be some future hypothetical payoff. Because you enjoy it, you do it all the time. Because you do it all the time, you get really good at it. Because you get really good at it, you do get the results.

Wouter Teunissen (0:39)

Right.

Shaan Puri (0:39)

That's the flywheel.

Wouter Teunissen (0:41)

In this episode, we talk about what it takes to be successful, how to work smarter, not harder, and how to live a good life.

Shaan Puri (0:47)

I think hard work is over. It's probably maybe the fourth or fifth most important variable. I think the very first one is...

Wouter Teunissen (0:54)

You had a great life, seemingly. So why did you end up moving, and what was that year of being strategically broke?

Shaan Puri (1:01)

Yeah, strategically broke. That's what I called it. I think most people just call it unemployed.

Why not? I put a luxury brand on it. So basically what happened is I graduated from college and I get a great job. I got a job paying me $120,000 a year to go work in a boring industry that I knew nothing about, didn't really care about, kind of stumbled into a job that I thought was too good of money to pass up.

Wouter Teunissen (1:28)

Yeah.

Shaan Puri (1:29)

So I go and I work for this guy. And sure enough, I'm like pretty bored. Actually, I'm like, oh, you know what? Like I can do this job, but I'm fairly bored. And it was a fork in the road because before I took that job, me and my friends had had this business idea. The idea was to create a sushi restaurant chain called Sabi Sushi. It was supposed to be the Chipotle of sushi. So the way you have Subway for sandwiches and Chipotle for burritos, the idea was we were going to do that for sushi. Okay. And we win this business plan competition. So on one hand, we get $25,000 of prize money that the three of us are going to live on. Or I could take this job for $120,000. So I take the job. Within a month, I'm like, this is lame. I just looked at my life and I was like, this is, I made a lame choice.

The good thing about me is I don't really make great decisions, but I make great reversals of decisions. Once I realized that I have made the wrong decision, I'm not one to linger in it.

Mostly because I just can't tolerate it anymore. Like if I was dating somebody, I remember I was dating this girl and realized like, all right, she ain't the one. I like just called her and broke up with her. Ten minutes later after thinking about it, I was like, what am I supposed to do? If I go hang out with her now, this will be unbearable now that I know what, I can't unsee what I've seen. I can't unknow what I know. And so I'm pretty quick to cut things off when they're not working. So I quit my job after a month and a half. I tell him, hey, I'm going to go work on my sushi restaurant. He's like, what? Okay. So I fly back and I meet up with my friends. And so we got 25 grand, three people. So we're basically $8,000 each for to live for a year. And I was like, I don't know how much, I don't even know how much life costs. I'm a college kid, right? When you're in college, everything is just provided for you. Like you swipe this thing, you get meals. Yeah. Things just like happen. Like my parents paid for the dorm or something. You pay up front. I just didn't understand. Like, you don't know what it's like to pay rent and bills and laundry and all that stuff. So I like how I threw laundry in there. It's like a $1.25 a week or something. So I don't really know even how much 8,000 is, but I know it's low, right? Because all of my friends got good jobs and nobody's making 8 grand a year. So I decided, okay, I'm either going to every day wake up and feel worried and shitty about money, or I'm going to commit and say, I'm going to try to spend this year strategically broke. So instead of being, I looked at my friends, like investment bankers, and they were money rich, time poor. And that's what I was when I had took that job. I was money rich, time poor. So I was like, okay, if I'm going to be money poor, I'm going to make a choice to be rich in other areas. So it's like, I need freedom and flexibility of my schedule. So I'm going to be time rich. I'm going to be adventure rich. Like I'm going to travel with my friends. We're going to do fun stuff. I'm going to be learning rich. So it's like, how do I learn if I'm making 10 times less, 12 times less here, I got to be learning 12 times more than I would on the job there. Now, the good news is that's not that hard of a bar. You don't learn that much on your like entry level jobs, or if you learn, you learn kind of the same task. You're not learning like a wide breadth of stuff. Whereas, with the business that we were doing, I'm learning about sushi and restaurant operations and how margins work and what a P&L is, and I'm learning to pitch investors, then we're negotiating a lease, and I'm figuring out how real estate works. I'm learning how, I remember we went to the city area and we were looking up liquor licenses, and while I was there, I learned that if you have a liquor license, your lease is on file, so then I found where we were negotiating, I found one place with a liquor license, I knew how much they were paying, so then I went back to the negotiation, I was like, we're only going to pay this, she's like, no way, we could never do that, like you are doing that in these four locations, so I know you could do that for us. She was blown away, so we were just learning all these little things, little like core skills, so sales, marketing, brand building, design, we were editing videos, we were doing whatever it took, we were blogging, we were doing just random stuff, but high action, and we just decided to have a shit ton of action and DIY, just do it all ourselves, hiring, firing, learn as many lessons as I could. And so that year, Strategically Broke, was about learning how little you need to live on, like sleeping on air mattress. I put up photos, so you've seen this before.