How To Go Beast Mode As A Founder

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
Alright, turn on the camera, turn on the camera. I got a rant for you.
I got a call yesterday from a entrepreneur who was going through something that is so relatable. They were stuck, they're at a plateau, their business is not growing as fast as they want. They were pitching me on all the new things that we're gonna do. New features they were gonna add, the new project. And then they start telling me about the side hustle that they got going on and I had to stop them and I had to tell them the truth. The truth is, stop searching for answers. We are all guilty of this, you know, like if I'm fat, all of a sudden I'm keto, I'm paleo, I'm reading books, I'm listening to podcasts and I'm not just doing the obvious things. The trap that people fall into is thinking that the answer to their problems is elsewhere, that maybe a mentor has it or a book has it or there's some knowledge that they don't have and that's what's holding them back. But that's really never the case. If I talk to 9 out of 10 people, only one might need a strategy change. For 9 out of 10, the answer is up your level of intensity.
All right, let's take a quick break. I got to tell you, you ever seen those Coachella posters where it's got all the artists' names and you're like, oh my God, wow, they got Fred again and Skrillex and this, that's what the HubSpot Inbound Conference looks like. Just listen to the speaker list that they have. I don't know how they pulled this off, but listen to this. Ryan Reynolds, Serena Williams, Kara Swisher, Matt Wolfe, Darmesh, they got Brian Halligan. They got tons of good speakers at HubSpot's Inbound. It's coming up, it's September 18th to the 20th. It's live in Boston and it's where you go if you wanna learn marketing, sales, AI trends. You wanna know where the puck is going so that you can be there before everybody else. Tons of great talks on stage where you're gonna learn sales strategies and proven marketing tactics, but also the networking where you get to meet other people and understand what are other people in the industry doing? How are other people getting ahead? So check it out, go to inbound.com to see the lineup and grab your tickets today.
The best part about intensity is that it's contagious, that you can actually create a culture of intensity. There's a wonderful story about Peter Thiel when he was running PayPal. So Peter Thiel was one of the, he was a CEO of PayPal, he was the first investor in Facebook. And I was curious because Peter Thiel's kind of like sort of a weird dude. And I was like, he doesn't seem like a classic manager, leader, inspiring guy, super organized, button down, running, you know, daily standups. It turns out he didn't really do any of that shit. He had a very simple system. His common sense system was, well, everybody in the company should figure out one priority. Like you should have one priority in your brain. You're gonna do one thing. What's it gonna be?
And forcing people to figure out one priority, not a to-do list, but a single priority was an incredible forcing function. Everybody had to say something. And if you said something stupid, it would be like, that's your priority. And so everybody picked one priority. But now that's good. But that's just like, you know, the very, very first half of the battle. What's the second half actually sticking to that? Because human nature is everything feels important. I have my one priority, but then there's the second thing that's important too. And then there's a third thing that's important too. And the problem with this that Peter said was that, imagine you have three priorities. And even if you have a stack rank them, you said this is number one, number two, number three. What happens is that we often don't know the answer to number one. Number one lacks a clear solution. It's a gnarly problem. It's an important problem, but it's not an obvious problem. So what we do is we just gravitate towards the second task because it's much clearer. I know what to do there. So I gravitate towards the known, right? It's that Warren Buffett story where the guy lost his keys outside of a bar. So he's crawling around on the ground trying to find his keys and the officer says, sir, what are you doing? He says, I'm looking for my keys. Did you drop them here? No, no, I dropped them over there. Well, why are you crawling over here? Because this is where the light is. And that's how most people operate in their day-to-day priorities. We crawl around where the light is. We crawl around doing the known things, the things that feel familiar to us rather than the important things, the things where the solution actually is over there. It's just in the dark.