Category: Business Strategy
Tags: businessgrowthmarketingmindsetprinciples
Entities: AristotleBusiness Growth PyramidCharles DarwinChief DetectiveElon Musk
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[Music] hi guys I want to explain how I think about business and marketing and life because I take a very distinct approach and it is a first principles approach and um I am certain that if you shift to
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this way of thinking and start to use a lot of the tools and Frameworks and first principles that I've developed it's going to give you an instant superpower I am 100% certain that if you start shifting to thinking in this way habitually you going to get better results in whatever you're trying to
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accomplish immediately it is just a better more sophisticated more effective way of thinking so um what what is a first principl approach basically first principles thinking I I believe was started by Aristotle back in the day um to teach people how to think and the
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premise was basically to stop you know pushing against a problem at the level of the problem but to get underneath it and understand the building blocks that were underneath so that you could rearrange those in more creative or more logical ways and then build back up to a solution so it was a it was to train
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people's minds it's a way of thinking and it's been used in the scientific you know world for a long time Elon Musk I think has repop it because he insists on using it across his companies Charles Darwin was a very you know prototypical
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um first principles thinker he was his his challenge to himself he was trying to create a grand unifying theory of the evolution of Life obviously and um he his challenge to himself was how do I get beyond the observable layer of existence and get to the building blocks
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the Big Ideas behind it and um why doesn't that exist for business is the question I don't understand why there isn't a user manual for building direct to direct to Consumer companies and e-commerce businesses because something I realized that hit me like a ton of
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bricks at some point along the way was that these companies are all the same they are all the same and and um they're formulaic and you can really cut to the Chase and get to success a lot faster if you Embrace sort of the underlying
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essential truths that are underneath our trade of building e-commerce companies there are facts of these businesses that for some reason just haven't been surfaced and compiled into a user manual and that's basically what I've done um to equip myself to build companies over the years and that's what I'm sharing
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basically so um all of the tools that I've developed basically represent you know a grand unifying theory of building companies and um I I first started to develop these when I was doing consulting so when you're in that role you're walking into these companies and
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you're always walking into a competition of ideas which is very valid you know and I always really appreciated you know that people could look at the same data and think about it the same way it stretches the thinking so there's nothing that's good you know but I think what happens a lot is that it ends up being driven by opinions and that the
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most aggressively asserted opinion is what wins instead of the right thing right what's the right answer the challenge was always we're growing at x% we're growing at 10% we want to grow at 30% what should we do and you can't do everything it's all prior you know you have to prioritize right so what are the three
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or four things we're going to do that's the competition of ideas and I found that often the most you know loudly asserted opinion is what would win and not the right thing so over the time of you know 3 four years of doing that Consulting work I developed my own set
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of first principes and I felt that my role was to walk into these companies with a point of view that was based in facts immutable non debatable facts of building businesses so that we could work up from those facts and figure out the right solution and I I thought it was my job to stabilize those
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conversations and Orient them towards first principles of building businesses so that's what I did I started to develop those over the years and um I've found it to be very successful and again I think if you shift into this way of thinking that you're stantly going to be
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better at business and at marketing you're instantly going to be thinking about things in a more effective way so um if you're looking you know for where to start I think that the business growth pyramid is 100% the way the the place to start that is the grand unifying that's my grand unifying theory
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of building businesses like I would always tell my clients this isn't rocket science we're not bombing into a new planet and trying to figure out what the laws of physics are like the law of gravity hasn't already been discovered and that's how I felt like people you know we're often in that mode and almost panicky of like what should we do when
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growth stalls out and it if you can kind of put your shoulders down and realize we're not that's not the case here we're not bombing in and trying to figure out the laws of physics they already exist and we need to just work with them as basic assumptions right we're auto mechanics where if you lift up the hood of a car you know they're they're all
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the same basically there's the engine and there's this cable that connects out to that and there's a relationship between the parts that's the right relationship and so if you have the map of what you're supposed to see when you lift up the hood of an e-commerce business or a direct to Consumer business you can then look at what's actually happening and you've suddenly
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got this kind of you are here errow like in the mall pointing to the problems right and it's like okay I can see the problems now we just need to debate the relative importance of those and what we should focus on so it stabilizes and orients the conversation I think if you're looking at your business and thinking about okay I need to grow the
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hell out of this thing next year what should we prioritize we can only do a few things that's the starting point is that pyramid that's what you know sort of the Whiteboard you know the game board for the team debate should be is that pyramid so I'd start with the growth pyramid and then I would go to the Winner's win which is um the winners
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win and they win and they win and they win strengthen strengths figure out what's working about the business and pour water on it it is a universal principle that to me is the law of gravity for building businesses it's also true in life by the way in terms of um building on your gifts whatever you
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are good at do that and um it's just such a fundamental law that gets ignored right and left so that's the second place place I would go is Winners win the third one would be spearo marketing um which we use all day long at Chief detective for doing advertis for any kind of thinking it's just a good tool
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for placing the level of your thinking and so that's the third place I would go would be spearpoint marketing and the other thing I want to say is that these are you know when I moved on from doing that Consulting and I started to build Chief detective these first principles became the basis of Chief detective and
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it's one of our core values like we do first principles thinking we always build from first principles up these I couldn't you know when I started to hire people I couldn't give them 30 years of experience building companies what I could give them was sort of the exhaust tail of that experience which is this user manual right my first principal
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tools and so this is what we teach at Chief detective and we've now thrown hundreds of millions of dollars of spend on meta at applying um these Frameworks into building companies I consider these to be very proven and I just think that they're fact so I really do encourage
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you to dig into these and also just globally in terms of your Global mindset of how you think about things shift to First principles in terms of your business problems because what are businesses they are problem after problem after problem and this is a really good way to approach them so um the other cool thing about first
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principles is that they also apply to life and um as you might have detected I am obsessed with the Dual journey of growing your business and growing your life at the same time I think that success is an inner journey and that it should be an inner journey and that's where it gets its meaning and what I
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realized in my own Journey when I was you know building companies but also really working hard on myself and my own mentality that all of the tools that I was developing for business could be flipped over and applied to life that they all had an analog in life so that growth you know the business growth pyramid for example there's a life
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growth pyramid that basically crunches down I've read so many self I'm an absolute self-help book junkie to the point where you know I'm I mean it's just I'm a total tool about this but it's just a passion but um I I realized at some point the same I realized with business that businesses are basically
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all the same that um it's all the same pieces and parts it's the same with sort of the multi-billion dollar self-help industry is that there are basically three or four Concepts behind all of those books and you know modalities and everything else that if you just grab those three or four Concepts and apply
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them to your life you're going to have a dramatically different outcome on whatever you're trying to accomplish and you're going to be so much more effective to the point where it should be they should be surfaced as first principles they shouldn't be patented it should just be these are the first principles of being successful they should be put into a user manual and taught in high schools I don't think
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that you should be able to go into adulthood without learning about you know the the core first principles of making yourself successful so I thought that was that was a really cool realization for me is that all of these tools have an analog in life and um and then the last thing I would say about
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first principles thinking is that it really should make things more fun and that was another thing I realized going into so many of these businesses as a consultant was everything was so tight you know and I think when it gets tight you lose kind of creativity and I think it takes looseness and humor and fun and
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camaraderie to actually come up with something creative and bring magic you know into a brand and so my great really greatest hope um for you and sharing first principles tools the tools that I've developed but also just this way of thinking this habitual way of thinking
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that's better is that your shoulders go down and whatever you're trying to do gets more fun and one of my son's Math teachers told me one time that the kids who are really good at math are the ones who actually enjoy the math and I think that's such a great phrase because math is problem solving and when you're in the middle of a problem if you clench up
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and you panic you're never going to solve it but the kids who really enjoy it and love being in that quicksand trying to figure stuff out those are the kids who get really good at math and I think it's the same in business I think it's the same in life the people who can enjoy it and kind of go with the problems and keep their shoulders down and enjoy the math of life and of
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marketing and of business those are the people who get really good at it so I really hope that um in sharing the tools that I've developed over the years and also just broadly this way of thinking that it helps you enjoy the math of whatever you're trying to accomplish [Music]