As we bring this conversation to a close, I think it’s reasonable to say that we’ve discussed a significant amount of content. We’ve examined a lot of aspects of gathering the motivation to get your dream business off the ground, and the follow-through to keep it airborne. There are some points that will resonate more acutely with some and other points with others. My entire goal for writing this book is to inspire more innovation by disabling fear and tapping into the guts of courage. I want more of us to have autonomy, wealth, and happiness.
You can do it. The fear of the heavy lifting is much heavier than the actual heavy lifting. There have been many lessons that I’ve learned swimming through the stormy and beautiful climate of entrepreneurialism. We’ve discussed a lot of them in these pages, but in an attempt to give this book life after you’ve finished reading it, I want to create a list of the most valuable things I have learned over the past two decades of these experiences. First, the qualifiers to make it onto the list are that they have to be lessons or words of wisdom that affected me so profoundly that I think about them daily. Second, each needs to be a piece of wisdom that is necessary to get to the extraordinary level. Without it, I don’t believe the echelon of extraordinary can exist. Third, it’s executable.
Yup, you guessed it. One more time for me to beat this concept into every inch of your cerebral space I can access. If one single word summed up this book, this is the word. Activation is the catalyst for my whole story. I believe with a steadfast passion that activating and activating quickly is why I was able to get the head start on creating Ten Thirty One Productions to be the first-of-its-kind entertainment company. It made an industry out of a dark-horse, multibillion-dollar undefined space. And being the first one in the pool has helped get the attention of the world, and being the best we could helped us to grow into the thought leader in the space.
Chapter 2, and candidly the entire book, covers this ideal in depth, so I won’t reprise all those points. But I will say: Activation is the bridge between ideas and wealth. Everyone has ideas. It’s the activation of the idea that makes you special, and without it, no idea will ever be realized. Period.
Once you close this book, you should be twitching with impatience to start and activate.
There will be no magic without activation. Dream . . . dream exorbitantly, scream it from the mountains, but for crying out loud, climb back down from the mountain, wake yourself up, and jump. You’re a magic maker and the world needs more magic makers.
These four words are my bible. I have to credit an old colleague at Clear Channel for teaching me the value of making a decision. She said to me, “Carbone, come over here. Congratulations on your promotion into management. I’m going to give you the best piece of advice I ever received. Always make a decision. Even if you don’t know the answer, make a decision anyway, and don’t ever say you’ll think about it and get back to them.”
Throughout my whole career, whether it was my corporate-sector experience or my life as an entrepreneur, this has proven its value over and over. A decision is what positions a demeanor of leadership. Making a decision will present you as confident, courageous, and one who is comfortable with power. As soon as you waffle or need to think about it, you’re opening the door of doubt. If you’re sending an army into battle, the soldiers need to have complete faith in your decisions. A leader who needs to think about the answer and get back to you at a later date has said “I’m not confident yet so you shouldn’t be either,” or “I’m not an expert.”
Even wrong decisions can be better than no decision. Let’s qualify that quickly so I’m not responsible for someone hitting the nuclear button. I’m not referring to decisions that send us to war or destroy forests. I’m talking about decisions being made in your entrepreneurial journey to leadership. Everyone can be right or wrong, and everyone can win or lose, but you have to create belief in your leadership and that comes with decision making and being comfortable holding the decision-making power.
This is straight off the presses from Mark Cuban. Shortly after we appeared on Shark Tank, the proverbial phone lines started to light up. Everyone had an angle they wanted to pitch us or a property that would be perfect for a Campout or Hayride. Corporations would call us to build their Halloween parties or rent out our props. Movie collaboration opportunities were presenting themselves; franchise deals or cruise lines wanting to reboot Ghost Ship on steroids were all landing in my inbox in a normal day.
I’m an overachiever by nature, and I don’t want to miss any opportunity that could yield positive growth for my company, so I tried to do it all. I started saying yes to every opportunity that seemed legitimate, and I wasn’t willing to be patient and go with “slow and steady wins the race.” Life became the hamster wheel. I couldn’t get forward momentum because I was struggling just to keep up with the workload.
As mentioned earlier, Mark and I discussed company progress regularly, and he once advised me not to drown in opportunity. That echoed in my head like a freight train when you have a migraine. It was exactly the problem.
Trying to take all the opportunities that come your way will almost ensure that you lose. You may want take all the opportunities because you’re afraid of losing, but in fact it’s taking everything that makes failure happen. Choosing the ones that feel the best; putting all your focus on those few items, will yield the greatest chance for those endeavors to be successful. Spreading yourself thin will do the opposite and just distract the focus from any one thing, leaving them all to be less than your best.
A great by-product of this lesson is the power of “no.” My time and my company became more valuable and prestigious by choosing and saying no because we became more exclusive. Not just anyone would be accepted into the womb of our focus.
One of the biggest success blockers on planet Earth is getting caught up in the noise or minutia surrounding the important parts of our lives. Oftentimes we think we have too much on our plates and have to clean them off. A day job, kids, soccer practice, that SoulCycle class to fit in three times a week, grocery shopping—it’s already too much to manage. Something has to go. Who has time to add building an empire to the mix? But which thing or things do you eliminate from your busy life? You love them or need them all.
Think of each of those items as one ball in the air, so based on the list above, there are five balls in the air. You can manage five balls. Why does it feel so overwhelming? What overwhelms us is the noise around each ball. Each ball creates sub-balls around them, or noise. The noise around the core of what you love or need is what keeps us spinning. We then become so focused on the noise that we lose focus on the actual point at hand, the core of the need.
Grocery shopping is one theme, but if you look at how many times it comes up in a week, it’s undervalued as one ball. If three days a week you notice you’re out of creamer, bread, olive oil, and have to make a special trip to the store for one or two items, that’s noise. Getting in your car and driving ten minutes to the store is noise; waiting in line at the store is noise. You’ve now created six additional trips to the store, line waits, etc. . . . at least seven balls of noise have been added to the one ball in the air called “grocery shopping.” If we use that formula across all the balls in the air, we have five core balls with seven noise balls stuck to them, which now means we are juggling thirty-five balls.
My proposal is to eliminate the noise around the balls, not the balls.
Soccer, SoulCycle . . . these are what we love. Don’t eliminate the part you love. Eliminate the part you don’t love. The noise. Eliminate that shit. Don’t sacrifice the SoulCycle class, aka your health, because you just realized you need olive oil for tonight’s dinner. Either use an app like Postmates for delivery or order takeout. If you don’t have Postmates, use any grocery delivery service. They are out there. I was just in Nebraska and even they have grocery delivery options, so there’s no excuse. There is always another way; you just have to be willing to build an infrastructure around your life that makes the minutia disappear from your head so you can focus on the primary ball, not the noise balls. And creating the infrastructure takes a commitment of time, but it’s an initial commitment that, once in place, will give you your time back. That infrastructure could take you from thirty-five balls down to the five primary juggling balls, but even if it takes you down half, to seventeen or eighteen, you are still winning. Set up all your bills on automatic billpay; the ones you can’t can be set up as payees in online banking. Dedicate a board or space at home to add items needed throughout the week at stores and make one trip per week. If something falls outside of that trip, use Postmates or take out and don’t budge on that rule. Create rideshare programs for practice, or split up the duties with others in your house; post a communal calendar that has SoulCycle days listed and create boundaries around that time. Give kids more chores to do; depending on your financial resources, hire an assistant to take over things like managing plumbers and car repairs, booking travel, and anything else considered a time suck of your attention away from the prize. Assistants can range from a person who manages your whole life to a part-time student at the local college needing extra work. The point is to take the time to create a model that removes the noise from your plate. Create that once, and sit back and watch your time return—those hours you reclaim can be spent building your empire.
This is our internal fear kicking in to make us believe we are justified in turning around and not going for it. We pretend it’s the most rational and logical path . . . to stop or keep thinking forever. Someone can look like the perpetual researcher—a person who investigates forever to become an expert but never feels she or he really has all the answers, so they’re happy to keep researching. It can be the person we talked about in chapter 10 who feels like they just “don’t know how,” so he or she never does, or a host of other excuses a person can think of to veer them away from the direction of their most extraordinary life.
This lesson is about not being afraid to call yourself out and to recognize when you’re not activating because of fear, that your overthinking is there to justify the inaction. I promise that, while you think, others will activate and eat your strawberry rhubarb pie right out from under you. This is in essence the core of what this book is about. Take the shot, take a hundred shots before anyone else even has their gun out of the holster. You may miss half of them, but who cares because that means you hit half. You may miss ninety-nine but that means you hit one, and one is often all you need. The overthinker’s gun is still in the holster, which means they didn’t hit anything at all. And regardless of what you hit, at least you can stop overthinking and get back to living. Ready, Fire, Aim.
If I just had a little more capital . . . Once the kids are out of school and I have more free time . . . When I reach the job title to which I’ve been aspiring . . . When the market stabilizes . . .
I read an article that sampled 3,200 seniors over seventy years old and asked them if they felt they achieved their life dreams and aspirations. When you took the family aspirations out of the question and left it to personal accomplishments or career, over 90 percent of them had dreams they didn’t feel they’d actualized. And many of them cited similar types of reasoning, in different ways of course. More or less the majority sentiment was that the timing just didn’t work out or other more pressing things got in the way.
You must not count on time to deliver a perfect little golden egg into your basket to crack, fry, and eat. You wouldn’t sit and wait for the universe to deliver your next meal to fall out of the sky. You go to work and earn the money, then go to the store to buy your food, then bring it home to cook it. You make that meal come to fruition. The best life to which you aspire is the same. The timing will never be perfect. There will always be something that needs to be moved out of your way. And I know that because 90 percent of that sample group would have answered differently if life’s aspirations were just teed up and ready when you were. Don’t count on anything outside of yourself and your own ability to outwork everyone to destroy the obstacle that tries to derail you from your path. If you wait for the timing to be perfect, you will be waiting forever.
The worst thing you could say to me is “be reasonable.” I’d love to see a history book of reasonable visionaries, inventors, and road pavers of evolution and progress. Actually, I wouldn’t because it would be terrible reading.
If you are afraid to write your story without borders, without using your imagination to its most interesting corners, the story will likely not be the epic fairy tale for which you are hoping. My biggest fear for aspiring bad asses is that they have the guts to jump but will put a big air mattress called “reason” below them. You can, of course, prepare yourself for any risk with knowledge and mitigate being reckless, but trapping yourself with reason can mute the special note that moves your progress into new echelons.
It was unreasonable to think women should vote, gays could marry, air travel and electricity were possible . . . you get the idea. Einstein, Rudolph Diesel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Rosa Parks, Pythagoras, and Elvis were all just like you and me before an unreasonable thought turned them into a societal changer who made history.
It’s not a far reach of the imagination to believe that success can breed a little narcissism. Because of this, I have found myself in a lot of rooms where speaking is a validation for one’s existence in the room. People will often interrupt one another or talk over each other, but inevitably, it creates a longer meeting and more convoluted action items. It’s also not the best look, in my opinion.
“Don’t interrupt” is first. It’s frustrating and it makes you look sophomoric and more interested in your own comments than anyone else’s. Others will interrupt you and talk over each other, and just let them. Be the sponge in the room that absorbs all the information. When you do speak, be concise and make it pointed . . . no fluff just to get your voice heard before the meeting adjourns. I promise you, it will get you respected and invited back. Saying something of substance is always the hot commodity in any space. Don’t use jargon. Your thoughts become valuable by listening to the subject, absorbing, and understanding. Then you can spit out nails!
In the beginning, you have to be uncomfortable enough to keep yourself moving out of the discomfort. As hard as that is to digest, you have to stay hungry and need to keep skin in the game. The pain is what sends you searching for a way out of that pain. There is probably no one who understands how much the pain of discomfort stings more than I do, so I get how hard a pill it is to swallow, but I don’t think you can get anywhere special without it. I mean this both personally and professionally as I have worked through these lessons. The hard falls I have taken with Ten Thirty One have helped me to pave stronger paths and wear better armor. The personal struggles of losing an important relationship forced me to make hard changes that led me to a new love, with whom I can now be my best self.
I know it’s hard. Try to find some peace in the discomfort by having faith that it’s exactly where you’re supposed to be. I still struggle with this, so maybe find peace in that we’re really all in it together.
The pull to grow is strong, and it’s easy for something to take you off your original course. Nothing can throw a curveball at your new venture, business, or empire like someone who thinks they have a great idea for you or something you think up for yourself that seems fun and innovative. The filter for adding something to your pool of focus should be: Is this the core or mission of this empire? Is this what we got into this business to create? If the answer is not a resounding “yes,” then you should pass.
You know how many horror movie ideas I have gotten over the past nine years? At minimum, probably one a week. We aren’t a movie company, and while it sounds fun and fancy, it’s just not our core. We’re an entertainment company that creates, owns, and produces live attractions in the horror space. If something doesn’t first fit that mission, it can’t go on to the next criteria. Every business begins with a singular purpose, and it’s good practice to stay true to that mission. It concentrates focus rather than spreading you too thin, and it’s where you have done the most due diligence and have learned the most, so stick with it until you have dominated that space to a point where you have maxed out your return. Only then should you start focusing elsewhere.
With these ten lessons that I have carried with me, I feel like I have left you with a concise but big enough view of what has worked for me and many whom I have coached, managed, and those who have coached me. These guidelines are what I’ve discovered through my steps in the entrepreneurial, corporate, and personal world. I try to pay attention to my life. I probably think about the details of the steps a bit too much at times, but I have come to trust my process implicitly. I trust it even through pain and discomfort, when it would be easy to doubt, because these principals inevitably take me back to where I want to go.
The other thing I trust implicitly is that you have everything you need to write your own success story and live your dreams. The hardest part is just to start.
I wrote this book for no other reason than to inspire more innovation and hope, because I believe that too many people are missing out on something that is more accessible than they think. That’s not to say it’s not a lot of work, because it is, but so much of it requires only fundamental ideas that can be learned and a ton of elbow grease.
I am certain there is some magic maker reading this book right now with the idea that will make her or him the next Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Oprah Winfrey, or Steve Jobs.