Ep 2: Control What You Can Control with Justin Cobb

Tim Jordan:

It's amazing how much time I've spent in my life, professionally and personally, thinking about the things that I can't control or maybe not focusing on the things that I can control. Our guest today is going to talk about that, and he comes from a wide range of experience and a big list of successes. Definitely going to be worth listening to. Hang around for the whole episode. I guarantee you're going to find some snippets in here that absolutely can benefit you personally and professionally. We're going to jump into the episode now. Here we go.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Growth Gear podcast. I'm your host, Tim Jordan, and today we're going to be discussing a topic that I'm continuously trying to learn, and frankly, I'm continuously reminded that maybe I'm not doing very well. We brought on a guest, a guy who's actually taught me several of those lessons, some of them painfully. He's beat these ideas into my head, specifically related to the idea of only focusing on what you can control, or maybe the idea is to not try to control what you can't control. Our guest is Justin Cobb. And Justin, do you think I said that well, or how would you describe that title?

Justin Cobb:

Happy to be here, Tim. I don't think that there's a greater predictor of happiness or success than one's ability to only focus on things that they can control. I think this has been a struggle forever, and it's probably even harder now with the amount of stuff that's put in front of our faces. The average person checks their phone 352 times a day. There's a lot of stuff that comes through on your phone, on social, messages that come through that you just don't have any control over.

Tim Jordan:

First off, you mentioned something about one of the highest probabilities of success, right? Being able to learn and balance this. And I'm just going to brag on you a little bit for just a second. And those of you listening, if you're not familiar with Justin, I hope that you look at this as context to help set the stage for Justin's advice and the validity of it. We're not trying to bring on guests that just say things that are great or pulled some prompt off of ChatGPT. These are folks that have gone through the trenches themselves to learn these hard lessons. So some of the highlights of Justin's career, even though he's still pretty young, he has helped to kickstart, incubate, and mentor over a thousand different business leaders in 14 or 15 different countries, Justin?

Justin Cobb:

15.

Tim Jordan:

15. Through his organizations that he's built, he's helped raise several billion dollars for some of the largest charities in the world. He's created tens of billions of dollars in sales for some of the largest telecom energy companies in the world. And it's all culminated to his ability to do what he hoped to do, was retire by the time he was 40. And although he was financially able to do that, I know that that didn't happen. I met Justin when he was getting kicked off in another venture that is now Carbon6, which I'm a part of. And grateful that Carbon6, the sponsor powering this podcast. Justin, anything else to add to that? To the ... This is why you should listen to me because I've done this list of flexes?

Justin Cobb:

It really just comes down to how much distance you can make up in what period of time. And I was 23 before I even had a job that I held for longer than three weeks. I played sports growing up. I wrestled in college. I was lucky enough that I grew up in a family where they were convinced that me not working at college and instead getting good grades was a good use of my time. From the minute that I started taking things seriously and found an opportunity that I could really sink my teeth into, it was just a full-on sprint, and I've been sprinting ever since.

And I think that people confuse stress with pressure a lot. So stress is worrying about something I don't have control over. I can't pay a bill, but I need to pay the bill. That's stressful. I'm worried about the future and I'm nervous about the future. That's stressful. I'm worried about mistakes I've made in the past, like I said, and I can't do anything about them, and that's stressful.

Pressure is in the present moment, I'm going to put pressure on myself to be the best version of myself that I can be. I'm going to perform at the absolute best of my ability. I'm going to prepare. I'm going to put tremendous amounts of pressure on myself to be disciplined, to prepare, so that when I'm playing the game ... And business is just a big game. When I'm playing that game, as a result of putting that pressure on myself, I'm maximally prepared.

Tim Jordan:

I remember a phone conversation that you and I had recently. I don't know if you remember it. Maybe a year ago, but I was at Disney on vacation with my family, and they had gone off to the park and I'm walking around and it was you and me and another colleague were on the phone. I remember you said something. You're like, "Tim, you have to stop trying to control everything." And in this situation that we were talking about, I was trying to put my hands in something that it shouldn't have been in, or trying to be too involved with something. And you're like, "Tim, you're really good at this other stuff. Why are you trying to control these things that frankly you suck at? Why are you trying to get involved in that?" And it was something that stuck with me for a long time, and I've heard you say it to other people.

Tell me as we kind of dive into this conversation, I want to get into a little bit of backstory here in a second, do you see this as a huge problem in business leaders and entrepreneurs in general? Do you see it as a really big problem with a few people, or do you see everybody have a problem with this? This is what you want to talk about, the advice you want to give today. Why is that? Why is this the topic?

Justin Cobb:

There's a couple sides to it. So one is the ... I'm going to worry about stuff that I clearly have no control over. It's going to eat me up. It's going to cause damage in my body. It's going to cause damage in my mind. I'm going to be focusing on that, when I could be focusing on making a change. What you're touching on is ... It's a second side to this, focusing what you can control. It's almost focusing on what you should control.

As a parent, I had this vision of parenting where I thought, "I'm going to build these little people to be exactly what I want them to be." I expected my son to be wanting to be a major league baseball player, because that was my first dream, and wanted him to be throwing a ball by the time he was two, and wanted him to love that. And he doesn't even like baseball. He likes surfing. And the more I tried to control what he would like or what he did, the further away it got from that being something that he wanted to do.

And I think that when it comes to building teams and when it comes to working with other people, it shows a real confidence in your team when you let people be themselves, when you trust. It's okay if someone on my team makes a mistake today. That's okay as long as they learn from it and they put pressure on themselves to be better next time.

Tim Jordan:

So the two sides of this, and I didn't think about that coming in, is trying to control the things around us that we can't control or maybe stressing about the things that we can't control, and then maybe trying to have too much control over things that we shouldn't be trying to control. So two sides of this.

Justin Cobb:

Totally right.

Tim Jordan:

And I know we could probably talk for six hours. We're not going to do that today, but I know you have a lot of thought and experience. And most of this started pretty early in your life. Maybe one of these first revelations of trying to control things, you alluded to wanting to be a major league baseball player when you were a kid. And I know that, at least from what I've heard, that was kind of one of the genesis to this concept you have, of not stressing about what you can't control. Tell that story a little bit.

Justin Cobb:

Yeah. So growing up I loved baseball, which I think was common in my generation. And I was a huge New York Mets fan. At 9, 10, 11, 12, I was good. It was a small field and I was a small kid, but I was good. I hustled like crazy, and I could hit and I could field and I could throw a little bit and I could run. And then when you turn 13, the field gets bigger because theoretically you as a human are supposed to be going through a growth spurt and getting bigger and entering puberty. And the field got bigger, but I didn't get any bigger. I was tiny. I was the smallest kid in my grade, and I went from being one of the better people in the state at 12 to being a slightly above average person on my team at 13.

And there was a ceiling. I realized that no matter how badly I want to do this thing, I likely don't have control over it. I probably don't have the physical build in order to realize this dream. And that hit me really, really hard. Or maybe I did, but the probability was low. And your time is a risk, and your heart and your love into something is a risk.

Well, as a freshman in high school, this guy comes up to me, Nick Racano. He was the toughest kid in our grade, and I was the smallest kid. And he goes, "Hey, you should come out for the wrestling team." And I'm like, "The wrestling team?" He is like, "Yeah, I think you'd do well." And I'm thinking to myself, "I've never been in a fight in my life. I can't even do a fucking pull-up." Okay. We need a 103-pounder. I'm like, "All right, that's what this is really about." I'm like, "I only weigh 86 pounds." He's like, "Perfect, you'll be great."

So I joined the wrestling team, lose my first match, win my second match. I'm one and one, and I'm doing the math. I'm a big stats guy, a big numbers guy. So I'm like, "Ah, by the end of the year, maybe I'm going to be like 17 and 17, or 18 and 16." I lose the next 18 matches consecutively, getting pinned in under 30 seconds in all of them. I finished the year 1 and 19. Terrible. I mean, every instinct a person should have for that sport, I didn't have. And it didn't work for me.

And I was still playing baseball, and I was making the all-star team, the talent, and I could still make the varsity team, but there was a ceiling. And with wrestling I thought, "If I can get good at this, there's a weight class. And so that thing that upsets me so much, that feels so unfair, that chip, maybe I got a shot." And so for the next two years, I obsessed over wrestling. I quit baseball, my first love, and I went all in and I wrestled all off-season. I went to camps. I studied film. I did everything. And by my junior year, I won over 50 matches. I won a state championship.

And it really set me up for a life where I realized that I could do just about anything that I wanted to do if I had the right attitude. And this is focusing on what I can and can't control. This is the ability to get up after losing 18 matches in a row, and have it motivate you to work even harder. And all the hits you take in business, I've tried to seek out things that I thought were fair. Fair fights. I felt like baseball wasn't a fair fight for me. Wrestling, like I said, was a fair fight. So I've seeked out industries and situations that I thought were fair fights, and I've applied those same principles to it. And not only been able to achieve success for myself, but was able to create a factory where I was able to help create tremendous amounts of success and wealth and freedom for many, many people over the course of my career.

But more important than creating that initial success is, to me, it's the building blocks. This building block of ... What you can control is your attitude. You can control your work ethic, your intensity, and you can control how good of a student you are. And that can apply to working on your weaknesses. That can apply to learning a new trade. When we started in e-commerce, it was all new to me. I had to ask Kazi three or four months into the company what a product manager does. I'd never worked in a company that had product managers before.

I remember meeting you, and you telling me about these conferences that people went to for Amazon, and I had no idea. We'd already bought five software companies at the time. We were starting on our strategy, but we had so much to learn. What's an ASIN? What is a TACO? Why do Amazon sellers eat? What is going on? And the ability to just consume material and be open-minded and learn and learn and learn and attack and put the biggest experts you can find around you and in a room and ask questions and ask more and ask more and ask more and ask more and ask more. I think it sets you not only up for success, but I think it sets a culture up for a tremendous amount of success as well.

Tim Jordan:

So you, as a wrestler, the things that you couldn't control ... You couldn't control your size. You couldn't control the level of experience you had. I mean, I wrestled a little bit in high school. And I remember some of these kids had been wrestling since they were five and six years old. And you came in at ninth grade and started that, and just obviously got your butt beat. You couldn't control how much experience you had, but with the right attitude, with the right work ethic, and being a great student ... Even if you're trying to learn something that you are not naturally good at, even if you're trying to out-hustle people and outwork people that are just great hustlers, what you're saying is those are three things that you can control. The attitude, the work ethic, the education.

So let me ask you this, on the attitude thing, a lot of people talk about attitude, a lot of people talk about mindset. With all the different businesses you've been involved with, some of them are not just startup businesses, mature businesses too. What is the most, I don't know, harmful or catastrophic attitude that you see consistently being had that's really demoralizing businesses, or eliminating people's ability to go past the ceilings they think they have? Where do you see the biggest attitude problem at?

Justin Cobb:

We were at the All-In Summit, one of our partners at Carbon6, Naseem, and I last year. And Khosla from Khosla Ventures, he's one of the richer Indian businessmen, was talking about the importance of venture capital in the entire business ecosystem. And venture is interesting because for every 20 businesses that get invested in, 19 of them fail for every one Airbnb. Maybe it's 99 for every one but Airbnb, 19 for every one business that becomes moderately successful. And so some people say this is silly. There's billions and billions of dollars moving around, and maybe even trillions over time, and most of it just goes to nothing.

And what the gentleman did to show the value of venture, he said, "Everything, every great technology, every great advancement is always by the founders." He said, "There's thousands of smart people in this room. There's four people on stage worth a half a billion or more, with me. Someone tell me the last great technology that's been created by a company where the founders were not involved in the business day-to-day." No one had anything. There was nothing.

What you can't replace is the feeling of ownership. Anything else other than that is a cancer to progress. So whether or not I own the business that I'm working in today or not, if I can have the mentality of ownership ... I mean, how different is the customer service experience at a restaurant when the founder of that business is the one waiting on you, or their daughter or their son is the host, or they're just in the building? And why is that? Because the founder's mentality is I'm willing to die for my goal. Failure is not an option. I have to win. I have to move the ball forward. I have to achieve what I set out to achieve.

So for me, the question isn't what's the wrong or the cancerous mentality. It's that what progress is demanding is this insane, sickening level of work ethic. This insane, sickening mentality of success. And everything else is just rolling the dice. Maybe you'll be successful, probably you won't. And that difference might be 1%, or a half of 1%, but the gap that it makes is everything.

Tim Jordan:

So I'm sitting here asking about attitude, thinking about the negative attitudes, and you're basically saying ignore all that. That doesn't matter. The attitude implication here is the attitude of ownership, of you have to win, of you have to succeed. More of a pushing yourself forward attitude, not a avoiding things that drag you back attitude, right?

Justin Cobb:

If you're focused on what drags you back, you got no chance. I mean, there are people whose attitudes and mentalities are so much stronger than yours that just laugh.

Tim Jordan:

Just for the record, when we started this, I said, "There's a lot of stuff I learn from you." This will be another sticky note on my wall, because I realized you just called me out for doing it too. You're like, "Tim, you're asking you about the negative stuff. Stop worrying about the negative stuff."

Justin Cobb:

Think about ... You have a motor, right? And that determines your top speed and that's your pace. Well, what are all the points of friction against that pace? I'm in a race and I start looking to the left and looking to the right and I'm getting too competitive, I'm not focused on where I'm going in front of me. I start worrying about ... I have a pain in my ankle. I started thinking about, "Oh my gosh, there is this pain in my ankle. What am I going to do about it? Maybe I should start favoring my other leg. Oh, I wish I trained differently in the past. I'm worried about this in the future." All that stuff, that just creates friction. That all takes calories. That all takes mental calories. If it's bad attitude all the way to great attitude, the only thing that matters is here. Everything else is the same.

Tim Jordan:

Yeah. It's just noise and friction. So talking about attitude, you mentioned work ethic, but you also had work ethic as point number two. So what would you tell people, a piece of advice, piece of wisdom, on work ethic? Maybe you can talk about how do increase your work ethic, how to focus on work ethic. And I'll this. I've never seen anybody with a stronger drive and higher work energy than you. You blow everybody's minds. So how do you do that?

Justin Cobb:

So I take this job doing door-to-door sales. And I like to compete, so it's fun. I don't know. It's fun and I'm pretty comfortable with my own skin. I've been traveling with bands and playing in a band and hitchhiking all over. I was always comfortable talking to people. But like I said, I'd never really had a job, so I didn't equate work to what other people equated work to. Work was just a sport to me. And in a sport, if other people are walking up the court and you're running, you're getting to the basket faster. So other people take an hour lunch, and I'd bring my lunch. Other people would walk between doors, and I would just sprint all day long. Other people would stop. They'd get out of the car, they'd get in the trunk, they'd start putting on their big jackets. I'd think, "Well, the easiest way for me to warm up and make money is to run to that first door first."

What happens at the end of the day? Well, you saw more people. So again, if your pitch was equal to somebody else's, you beat them. And you got better getting more practice. So over time, the gap became huge. My confidence became ... I'm going to be the best student possible of whatever I'm trying to learn. I'm going to apply it with more intensity, a better attitude, and a better work ethic than anybody else. And if I do that, I know I'm going to win and I'm going to deserve to win. And I'm going to be showing other people how to win.

I appreciate what you're saying. And that's a huge compliment. You've been around a lot of successful people in your life, Tim. I don't have to get myself in some zone to get in that place. This is the pace that works. And if I'm going to go out, and I'm going to go out and I'm going to try to achieve success for myself, for my family, for my friends. I'm going to try to help other people become successful. I'm going to try to be a good example for people in my community and my business. Then the only thing I can do is give the very best of myself.

And once I realize what that is, and it's controlling these things I can control, well then I really have two options. One is be true to myself and max out the potential that God gave me, that my parents gave me, that the breadth of experience I've had, or I can just be like everybody else. And if I want the life that everyone else has, well then maybe I'll do that, but I want something that's really special. I want something I can feel incredibly proud of, and I want something that is a great example, and I want something that really pushes the limits of what it's possible to do on this earth as a person. And so what are my choices? I'm either full of crap, or as I gain a better understanding of how I can become more efficient, how I can become more inspirational, how I can become more inspired. If I'm true to that mission, then I have to be like that.

And so then it becomes, well, what are the things that could drag that back? What are those points of friction? I noticed yesterday I got caught in a conversation where for too long, we were worrying about something that we had no control over and I didn't flip it around fast enough, and I wasted seven minutes there. And that's the way I start to think about it. That wave of hope creates so much momentum that when you're on that wave and you have people ... In the organization, for example, we'll say in Carbon6, people that come in and they come into one of our hands or they come visit us in our office in Toronto, it just feels different. Wow, this is different. This is what it takes to win a championship. This has a different feeling to it.

I imagine it was the same ... I'm not comparing us to the Patriots. I imagine it was the same on Brady's Patriots, and I imagine it's the same ... Fuck it. I will compare us to that. That's the level we're trying to play at, right? If you're going to do something and you got one life, you might as well try to do it to your max potential. You might as well see where it can possibly go.

Tim Jordan:

I'm trying to understand the way you think of work ethic. And the way you're describing it, what it sounds to me like what you're saying is that everybody has a specific potential of work or speed or effort that they are capable of, but most people don't operate on that level. And it might not just be sheer force of will. It could be things like efficiency, like what you're saying, taking time to put on a jacket. So people aren't thinking about how they can work more efficiently and saving three minutes here and there.

As an average, in the entrepreneurial world, we're all kind of competing with each other. If you're an e-commerce seller, you're competing against somebody else. If you're in sales, you're competing against somebody else. Just completely anecdotal, what do you think the average ... On that meter from zero to full potential, what are people operating at on average? 70%? 60%?

Justin Cobb:

And you want to know what, Tim? Whether it's 40% or 80%, to my point, either way, you don't win a championship. When Durant went to the Warriors, everyone criticized Durant. Oh, you're going to the Warriors? They already won a championship. The reality is that Durant was a fantastic basketball player with an insane work ethic, and unbelievably talented, who did not know how to win a championship. And when he went to the Warriors and he talked about ... He thought he knew what work ethic was. He thought he knew what mentality before he met Steph. He thought he knew what intensity was before he met Draymond. He thought he knew what meticulous preparation was in terms of being a shooter until he met Klay. He thought he understood mentality until he met Steve Kerr. But he got to experience it.

Tim Jordan:

So it's almost like work ethic could be swapped out for work intensity.

Justin Cobb:

Yeah. It's a combination of time and what you do with that time. And both numbers matter. It's like an Uber ride. It's distance times price per mile. And price per mile is higher in New York City than it is in other places. And then when there's surge pricing, they adjust one of those things. It's the amount of hours, amount of time in the seat, in the car of working, and it's what your dial is cranked up to when you're doing it.

Tim Jordan:

And going back to the theme, this is something you can control. Where you spend your time, how intense you take things on, every minute of every day, what you're doing with it. Those are all things that we choose.

Justin Cobb:

100%.

Tim Jordan:

The third thing that you had mentioned was being a great student. And I assume you're going to talk about being humble and always trying to take good advice, keep an open mind, all those things. And you're probably going to prove me wrong because on the other two things, my assumption was wrong in the way you were going. But talk about being a great student, and how that impacts our abilities to succeed in the context of controlling what we control.

Justin Cobb:

Even great inventions or great new songs or great new pieces of art are a compilation of everything that's come before, everything that that artist has been exposed to, everything that that inventor has been exposed to, combined with the right moment, the right mentality maybe, to produce that new thing. It's incredibly important that I spend a lot of time going as deep as possible towards everything that's within even a general periphery or a couple of standard deviations away from whatever I'm trying to do or create.

So whether that's ... We're a Series A company that's about to raise to Series B. We're growing organically like crazy, we're the top, I don't know, hundredth of 1% of companies in terms of what we've been able to do over the last year and a half. Well, somehow Elon's doing it in five companies at the same time, solving way larger problems than we're solving. We're helping enable e-commerce sellers' lives to get better, and we're helping power the biggest brands in the world all the way down to amazing solopreneurs. That guy knows stuff about being an executive I could learn from, and that's just the obvious.

When I moved to my direct sales business, to Spain, and I didn't speak Spanish, people wanted me to teach them the business and I'd make sure when I was in interactions with them, we were grabbing drinks at night or whatever, I'd be asking them, for at least 60% of the time, questions about how to conjugate verbs or when to use which present or future tense or which past tense, because again, I wanted to lead by example but I wanted to gain as much knowledge because that knowledge is what's going to determine the top speed, let's say, of the car that I'm driving.

And I think it was the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell, a few years ago where they said the 10,000-hour rule. You need to spend 10,000 hours at something to be great. Even Beethoven's best work came after 10,000 hours. Plenty of people spend 10,000 hours doing things and don't get any better at it. Not all husbands and wives get better after 10,000 hours at being husbands and wives, right? It's intense focus. Put your ego aside. Who cares? Something at Carbon6 we talk about, we don't care about being right, we care about getting it right.

That's what I mean, because the ego and the dogmatic thinking gets in the way of rational thought and being a great student. Frustration gets in the way of it. Once I've lost my attitude, whatever part of my brain is a good student is gone. My work ethic is probably going to suffer. I'm going to feel less motivated. Transversely, the more new information I have, the more excited I am to play the game tomorrow.

The ego is a powerful thing. And the ego is like ... If I do everything right at the end, my ego will feel great. If I worry about my ego at all in the process, I'm going to fuck it up. My ego is going to get in the way of my progress. So my confidence became ... I am going to become a better student for longer, no matter how much money's in my bank account. I'm going to remain in control of understanding, and a seed of emotional intelligence knowing that I know very little, and that there's something I can learn from absolutely everybody.

And I'm going to go into interactions and try to figure out what that thing is that I can take from this and learn, knowing that if I take from everyone else's strengths and everyone else's knowledge at a higher rate that they're taking from me ... And I'll volunteer and teach and impact and do everything I can, but I'm a better student, and then I then apply that with a better attitude like we talked about before, and a better work ethic. And if I do those things, I'm going to get fantastic results. Yeah, I'm going to win way more often than I lose.

Tim Jordan:

We, as entrepreneurs or really anybody that's successful in life, to have this right attitude, have the work ethic, things like that, they have to have some confidence. You're not going to have work ethic if you're not confident that it's going to pay off. You're not going to have a great attitude if you don't have confidence that you can be successful. What I was going to ask was how do you differentiate confidence and ego? Because you were talking about ego is such a killer, but you have to have confidence. How do you personally separate those two?

Justin Cobb:

A few things. So choose a fair fight. So baseball was not a fair fight for me. Look, ego is important. Ego helps pride. Pride helps work ethic. Pride helps tenacity, grit. It's not all bad. It really just comes down to that ... I want to get it right. I don't care if my premonition was right. I don't care if my idea was right. I don't care if what I thought going into this meeting was right. I don't care. It doesn't matter, because what I know is ... And I'm going to say it until I'm blue in the face. What I know is if I'm a better student than you, whoever that is, and I then apply it with more attitude, more work ethic, that's what gives me confidence. I know that that formula is going to win. And my ego is I'm going to do those three things better than you.

Tim Jordan:

Man, that's a lot like ... I'm trying to map that out in my head. I agree, but it's interesting. To me, it's almost like the secret is balance in quantity, right? Salt's a good thing. We have to have salt, but we can't drink salt water. A little bit of salt in the loaf of bread's good. Way too much salt completely ruins it. So the ego, the confidence, even the humility. Humility is a good thing, but you can have too much humility, which will lead to maybe a decrease in work ethic or decrease in drive or decrease in attitude.

Justin Cobb:

In order to get along with people, which is a critical part of doing most things that are great, the way things surface has to be sophisticated. Sometimes it makes sense for the humility to surface. Sometimes it makes sense for the ... William Wallace. I got this, guys. Follow me. I got this, girls. Follow me. So I think being balanced, what I would say for that is being in control. That's what I would say there. I would say it's more about being in control so that rather than your environment or the atmosphere or the situation determining how you are or how you act, then it's how you act dictates the environment around you.

Again, operating from a seat of emotional intelligence where you ... Take, I don't know, a sports coach. Jose Mourinho was the best football soccer coach in Europe for many years. And he was a real tough coach. He has a lot of bravado, a lot of ego. Really good coach, though. He was great. He helped Chelsea win a bunch of stuff they hadn't won, and had success with Ronaldo at Real Madrid, and had a ton of success, I think, at Roma and maybe before that somewhere in Portugal. And at some point though, the arrogance, the cockiness, the overconfidence, it went a little bit too far, and then he has gotten fired from five jobs in a row and hasn't succeeded. This guy had a chance.

Some people would say it happened with Belichick, and that Brady was able to stay in a more balanced place, was able to stay humble, a humble student and servant of a system, and servant of a set of principles or ambassador of that set of principles. And that Belichick ... I don't need you, Brady. I could do this with anybody. No, you can't. No, you can't. And now he doesn't have a job.

Tim Jordan:

We've talked lot about how we all naturally have strengths and weaknesses. And if we pick the fights that we're more likely to win, and then we apply more of the things that we can control, the attitude of the work ethic, the desire to be a great student, the humility to be a great student.

You also started off this episode talking about things like social media, how people spend way too much time on those things which they can't control. I almost think of those as distractions to those things. The attitude, the work ethic. What are some of the biggest, I don't know, problems, distractions that people can't control that you see in the current entrepreneurial environment? Maybe as a warning, because most of the people that are listening to this, they're in digital marketing, they're in social media, they have to be in social media. But maybe give a warning piece of advice to us to stay away from some of that stuff that's going to withdraw or diminish our ability to focus on these three core pillars that we've talked about.

Justin Cobb:

Yeah. I just think you have to curate your experience. I don't want to see a war and the result of that. There's a time where I might want to, as an empathetic person or a person that wants to understand what's going on in the world, where I might engage in that, but at 2:45 in the afternoon while I'm preparing for this podcast, it's probably not fair to your listener that that's where I put my brain. These companies are really great at getting our attention through spreading negativity and fear. And it's really hard. I haven't watched the news in many, many years because good news, nobody watches.

And I can remember in 2001 when September 11th happened, and that was really when the 24-hour news cycle started to be built. I think it was like Ashley Bancroft or something at MSNBC. And I remember watching that as a senior in college. That was a negative way to spend a bunch of hours. That made me way less productive. That made me feel way less hope about my life, about the world around me.

I think a lot of people are learning that for the first time now. It's not like the negative things are happening in a higher clip. In fact, you could make an argument with data that less negative stuff's happening than ever before. People on this planet are thriving more than ever before. Certainly, the Western world has had a run of peace with the start of the formation of the EU that we've never had before. But if I look for negative stuff, it's everywhere. And if I'm not careful, it's going to look for me because it knows that's how it's going to get my eyeballs. And then it's going to take me through this labyrinth that a lot of people aren't getting out of, man.

Tim Jordan:

And you're talking to our audience, there's a bunch of entrepreneurs. There's a lot of negativity right now for entrepreneurs. If you read business news, the Silicon Valley Bank stuff, the fed interest rates, all this crazy stuff happening. We're inundated with negative news, things that might scare us away from starting a business. Why would we leave a stable nine-to-five job and do this? Why would we go and hire 50 more employees and put more strain on our burn to continue growing this business? What would be your piece of advice to anybody that's listening that might hear some negative things towards the business environment in general, and why maybe it doesn't apply?

Justin Cobb:

Yeah. There's also a demonization of billionaires. There's a finite set of resources, and most of the people are playing the game and trying to compete for as much of it for their family and themselves as they can. But if someone wins too much, then we hate them. Same way the Yankees are the most loved and most hated baseball team. The same way LeBron both sells more jerseys and has more of his jerseys burnt every year than anybody else. If you're being criticized, there's a good chance you're doing something right. It means people are jealous, they're emulating you.

In terms of ownership, well, if you want control in your life, the only way you have control is if you own it. If I don't own it, I don't really have anything. I could be the best janitor in the world for Enron, but because I don't make the decisions, I don't have anything stable. It's a total misnomer to say that it's more stable working for another company than it is working for yourself. It's ridiculous. Who am I going to bet on over myself?

So I say this to people at our company, Carbon6, all the time. We're not all going to work together forever. I hope that you, 10 years from now, that all of you are working for yourselves that want to be. What we want to do is we want to teach principles, habits that allow you to win whatever championship you're trying to win in your life, so that one day when you leave here, you'll realize you're in more control than you thought you were before you got here. And that whatever path you decide to take, whatever you decide to do next, that you're going to be more prepared for that than you would've been and you not ran into the company.

And it's okay to be okay not in control, but the stability of that job is nothing but an illusion. And that illusion might give you comfort, and that's okay, but if you want control, you got to have ownership. You got to be part of the decision making. And to me, the goal had to be to find a way to get in that seat, and then I've spent my adult life teaching other people how to do the same.

Tim Jordan:

Justin, I feel like we could go for hours. I feel like there's no real good stopping place here because we could just keep going, but we're running out of time. Thank you for sharing this. Those of you that are watching on video, I've literally got two pages of notes. Justin, it might be fun to compare and see what I wrote down, the stuff that stuck out. For any of you that are listening, that you have some feedback, you have a thought, or maybe you'd like to see Justin back on another episode and ask him a question, send me an email. It's tim@growthgearpodcast.com. Just shoot me a note. Let me know.

For those of you that are watching this for first time, it's one of the very first episodes. Make sure to tell your friends, make sure to tell your mastermind communities. Talk to the Facebook groups that you're in, and let them know that this episode is valuable. There's a tidbit at least that you got out of here. When I speak at events, I say that my qualification for success is one tidbit. Justin's sitting here hammering us, making us second guess every decision we make in our life about our efficiency and our time spent. Was this 45 or 50 minutes worth it if you got one tidbit? I think that it'd be impossible to listen to this and not get something that's beneficial.

But make sure that you're having your friends, your folks, the folks that you hang out with, subscribe on any of the main podcast platforms, and also on YouTube Podcasts where we have the video format of this. Justin, thank you so much for being on. Any final words before we sign off?

Justin Cobb:

I've learned a lot from you, Tim. I'm very appreciative of the time we've had together, not just today, but in our time working together. And I love your commitment to spreading the good words to help other people become more successful. And everybody listening, go for it. Got one life.

Tim Jordan:

All right, awesome. Thank you all for being here. Catch us on the next episode, and we'll see you there.