You Don’t Need A Mentor -> Focus On THIS Instead

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
One thing that I don't think anybody really talks about, it's kind of touchy feely, but every single successful person I know has a story like this.
All right, Sam, I want to do a short episode that is about one specific topic, believers. So a lot of founders I know are interested in getting investors, getting advisors. I'm sure you get hit up a lot in your email for either, hey, will you invest in this? Will you advise in this? So I think everybody needs somebody in their career, usually in your early 20s, that believes in you more than you believe in yourself at the time. They just have an irrational belief. You're a penny stock, but they see you as a blue chip and they want to buy up all your stock. They do that by spending time with you, by spending effort with you, sometimes investing you, sometimes advising you, but it's not the advice, it's not the money that actually now in hindsight, when you look back is what mattered. The thing that really mattered was this person believed in you more than you believed in yourself at the time, and that they almost trick you into believing in yourself or to just going forward and overcoming that initial hesitation or doubts to just get going to where finally your evidence will start to catch up. Eventually, you're fueled by your evidence and you're fueled by your own self-belief. But it's like jumping, jumpstarting a car. There's people in your life who do that. I've never talked to you about this. I know a couple of people in my life that did this. I want to hear, did you have this?

**Sam Parr** (1:32)
I had this with a couple of people. First of all, my wife, I felt like she was doing the same thing when I met her. She was picking stocks and she picked a good one, I hope. Yeah, I had two. The first one was Scott Belsky. Scott Belsky currently is the Chief Product Officer of Adobe, soon to be CEO, I think. He's probably a billionaire because he has started and sold a bunch of companies.
I cold emailed him when I first started my company, The Hustle, asking him to invest and he said no. Then about six or eight weeks later, he was on our daily email and I got an email from him, in particular, when I was having a horrible day and he goes, these emails are just so good, I have to join and he gave me like $15,000 or something like that. I only met with Scott in person one time. Because Scott has always been, he was a big deal back then, he's an even bigger deal now. He had one meeting with me where he taught me, I had never heard the word steward. You know steward, like you are a steward of this capital, you are a steward of the brand. He gave me this pump up talk and he's like, you are so, I could tell you are going to be a steward of the hustle and a steward of my money, and anyone else's money, your customers, you have this and I remember thinking it changed my life. The fact that Scott fucking Belsky believed in me, and he used this word steward, I was so into it. The second person was Tim Ferriss. So I have told this story before, but basically I met Tim Ferriss because he lived near me in San Francisco and we would walk our dogs at the same time and just talk about neighborhood stuff. Well, a few weeks after we first started talking, I get an email from Tim saying, hey, I know what the hustle is, it looks really cool. Could we meet and get dinner? And I can ask you a little bit about email because I want to start a newsletter. And I was like, yeah, sure, let's do it, man. And so we go out to dinner in our neighborhood and I get down to sit at dinner and he goes, oh, you are the dog owners guy? Like you are the same guy? And I was like, yeah, man, what's going on? Because I never told him what I did for work when we would walk our dogs together because I wanted him to think, I didn't want to bother him because he was like a celebrity to me and I didn't want to ruin that relationship. And it was awesome, the fact that this guy like wanted to meet with me and he was like, what you guys are doing is so smart, so innovative. And I was like, it's not that interesting. He's like, no, it is. And he like bought into me and he believed in me. And that was such a big deal to me that he gave me the time of day, even just a dinner. It was like game changing where I was like, I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the best. Like there is no one better than me. And I had that like energy because of those two meetings.