The Most Valuable Skill For Any Founder

**George Mack** (0:00)
I love the show Ted Lasso, because it's like an example of, I call it Getting Ted Lassoed Now, which is when a Brit has twice the intelligence or knowledge, but the American has 10x the agency or confidence, and as a result, they achieve five times more.

**Shaan Puri** (0:17)
That was brilliant. George, you got an interesting career because you were at Social Chain early on. So people know Steve Bartlett from Dyrus here. He was there early. He then, so now he has, he then created a successful marketing agency.

**Sam Parr** (0:38)
And then a couple weeks ago, you came out with this thing. It was called highagency.com.

**Shaan Puri** (0:44)
Let me give the background here. George got obsessed with the way that, the way that Nikola Tesla fell in love with a pigeon. George fell in love with this idea of HighAgency. He started tweeting about it, started blogging about it. He's like, I'm gonna write a handbook on this thing. He started making it like his sole focus for at least what? Six months, George?

**George Mack** (1:02)
Well, I'd say five years. Five years is when I first started thinking about the idea when Eric Weinstein mentioned it. And then I started writing about it. I got advice that it would never take off as an idea. Interestingly, since we did our podcast last time when we discussed it, the idea or the meme as a whole has become bigger and bigger and bigger.

**Sam Parr** (1:21)
By the way, it's not five years. When I Googled your name, I Googled George Mack, High Agency. You were tweeting about this in November of 2018

**George Mack** (1:29)
Oh, seven.

**Shaan Puri** (1:31)
So let's explain it in the easy way to explain it. We can put this visual up on YouTube. So High Agency, the meme that stands out to me is there's a dude deserted on an island and there's two people. Person A takes the wood from the island and they try to spell the word help and they're just sitting there waiting to be helped. They're hoping somebody comes and saves them. And then person B takes those letters and builds a little raft and starts paddling themselves. They start helping themselves. And one is a higher agency version than another. The guy who builds the boat and starts paddling is the higher agency version. And so what's cool about this is you got obsessed with it, you got interested in the idea, then you got obsessed with the idea, then you committed to the idea, you started writing this thing and you told you were giving me updates saying you're writing this for a while. And Sam, do you know the story of how he got highagency.com?

**Sam Parr** (2:24)
No.

**Shaan Puri** (2:25)
Because he did not own that domain. It's actually a very high agency story.

**George Mack** (2:29)
Yeah, so one of the things I have in the piece is an exercise that I do, I recommend it, it's called turning bullshit into reality. So the way most people kind of live in the 21st century is like this to-do list model, where they empty short-term memory, like what's caching in their memory, and then they do that thing that day, versus the turning bullshit to reality model is you think of a value that you want to hold or live up to, and then you come up with ideas based off that. So it's a much more creative way of living the to-do list. So when I was actually writing the piece, it's kind of like, well, you want to be the personal trainer who's in shape, so I'd try and do some high agency stuff of how could I potentially promote this? So one of the things I was listing down, as I do the turning bullshit to reality exercise was, what about if I just get highagency.com? And I kind of look and it's like likely to be tens of thousands of dollars. But I then started reaching out to a few different brokers, a few little hacky people. And we realized that highagency.com, the person who owned it for like 20 years, I think it was an old agency, and it was about to expire when we looked at the domain. So we kind of sat there, waited for the moment that it would expire. And then it went into a little mini auction and nobody else online was aware of it. It was me and a marijuana, a cannabis marketing agency, which makes sense, High Agency. I hadn't thought of that. And yeah, managed to get it like essentially for near as free as a result. So that's an example of the turning bullshit into reality. And then when it came to actually promoting the piece, I was like, okay, let's write down High Agency. And then what are ways that I can display that value for promoting it. And I always go with my kind of facial muscles, or if I start giggling at something, I go, that's probably a good idea.