64. Improving your luck with brand guru Shane Skillen

Whether you’re talking about Greek philosophers or Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, success can often hinge on luck.

But what if you could improve your luck? What if you can bend the forces of fortune just enough?

That’s exactly what Ivey HBA 2000 grad Shane Skillen was eager to share with our community of entrepreneurs.

For over 20 years, Skillen has been leading the award-winning market research firm, Hotspex. Working with a who’s who of international brands, Skillen and his team have been helping companies connect better with their target audience through decades of change that have seen the rise of the internet, social media, and now artificial intelligence.

In this episode, Skillen shares lessons from his journey, and what we can do to improve our chances in an increasingly competitive world.

The Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by Connie Clerici, QS ’08, and Closing the Gap Healthcare Group, Inc.

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Eric Morse: 00:08

You're listening to the Entrepreneur podcast from the Western Morissette Institute For Entrepreneurship, powered by Ivy. My name is Eric Morse, and I will be your host for this episode.

Eric Morse: 00:21

Whether you're talking about Greek philosophers or Silicon Valley Tech success can often hinge on luck. But what if you could improve your luck? What if you can bend the forces of fortune just enough? That's exactly what IB HBA 2000 grad, Shane Skillen, was eager to share with our community of entrepreneurs.

Eric Morse: 00:40

For over 20 years, Skillen has been leading the award winning market research firm Hotspecs. Working with the who's who of international brands, and his team have been helping companies connect better with their target audience through decades of change that have seen the rise of the Internet, social media, and now artificial intelligence. Skillen shares lessons from his journey and what we can do to improve our chances in an increasingly competitive world.

Shane Skillen: 01:11

So great to be back. It's been a while. Brought back a lot of memories driving back here from Toronto. And I'm driving I live in Collingwood now with my wife and 3 sons. My kids are very competitive ski racers, so we moved up there during COVID.

Shane Skillen: 01:25

I used to be on the Western Ski Team, so it'll be like another trip back memory road. So, came here, the hope to help you all be entrepreneurs. Who wants to be an entrepreneur? Does anybody here not want to be an entrepreneur? There's a couple that why don't you want to be an entrepreneur?

Eric Morse: 01:42

I prefer supporting entrepreneurs, like investing on them more than Oh, So you want them to work for you.

Shane Skillen: 01:47

I like that. That is the best job, by the way. If anyone I've met, private equity bosses, who control your money and control the entrepreneurs, is the best job. But being an entrepreneur is pretty good too. So I want to mostly focus on luck, because as you ask, you know, entrepreneurs, you get to know lots of other entrepreneurs in our travels, you join things like Young Presidents Organization, and you ask all of them, how did you get so successful?

Shane Skillen: 02:13

And usually, the common thematic is there's a lot of luck. And it's true. There were like there were like 10 lucky things that happened to me. Had they not happened, I wouldn't be here talking to you today, but the good news is there's a formula to create your own luck. So if you leave here today, if you can remember how to do that, there'll be nothing more predictive of your future success than maximizing your chances for luck.

Shane Skillen: 02:36

Anyone know who that is? Yes. Yes, Max. Who is that? Richard Ivy.

Shane Skillen: 02:40

That's right. Richard, Max and I reviewed my presentation before at lunch, so he knew this was coming. So Richard Ivy, why is he up here? Because I would say one of the greatest, luckiest things that happened to me was, within a couple days of me graduating from Ivy, I called Richard Ivy's office and I asked his assistant, can I talk to Richard Ivy? I want to ask him some advice.

Shane Skillen: 03:00

And she said, it's very unorthodox. I don't think that he's gonna, I don't think he's gonna take your call, but hang on a second. Comes back 30 seconds later, she's like, okay. He'll totally talk to you. Are you available tomorrow afternoon at 2 o'clock?

Shane Skillen: 03:11

And I said, absolutely. Called him at 2 o'clock, picks the phone up, it's Richard Ivy, and I said, hey. I'm Shane. And he's like, how can I help you? I'm like, what would you tell me that I need to know that I didn't learn in school?

Shane Skillen: 03:23

So what would you have me know as a very successful entrepreneur? And he said, easy. You've got something called the Alumni Network. And if you go into the Alumni Network, because you're starting a business, Shane, they will help you. And he was totally right.

Shane Skillen: 03:37

It was super lucky for me to have that, because I immediately went into the alumni network, we just started Hotspecs, I went through all of the names, I found our first, clients in there, I found people that wrote us investment letters and I found people to give me advice. And so it was really fantastic for me. It doesn't matter if you're at Ivy or not, the people that you have in your network are a major source that are driving your luck. And I would say, you know, they say it's all who you know, it is totally about all who you know. So the more people you know and the better you make them feel, the more likely they are to help you.

Shane Skillen: 04:10

And it's a major major driver of luck. You can all do that. So this is like AI blast in the past. Year is 2020. This is my my an AI version of me and my 2 other founders.

Shane Skillen: 04:21

We were big ravers back in the day. The whole idea for Hotspecs, which is now a digital media market research company, we wanted to throw raves. We wanted to throw raves in Toronto. And the inter you can't imagine being accurate. It's crazy.

Shane Skillen: 04:34

Like, the internet had just come out when I was in school. We had to slide these stupid things into our computers. What do you call those things you used to slide into our computers? PCMIA cards? You're probably too young, even.

Shane Skillen: 04:46

Don't worry about it. So you'd slide these things into your computers and put this antenna up like this, and then you could go on the internet and it was like, so slow. Like, it would take like 3 minutes for Google to come back. Anyways, our idea was to use the internet to involve people in a rave in Toronto. So we needed to do surveys to get people involved in design of a rave we wanted to throw.

Shane Skillen: 05:08

Pick the DJs, name the pricing, pick the venue, pick the date, pick the food, pick the the the merchandise, and that was our idea. And then something lucky happened to me. Vir Gudwani, this guy right here, he was, in my same year. I had a good relationship with him because I'd helped him with a few things, so he was interested in helping me. So being part of my network, I created this luck, told him I wanted to do, and he told me I was crazy.

Shane Skillen: 05:35

It's like, you're that's ridiculous. Why would you want to do that involvement thing to throw a rave? Why don't you do it with the biggest brands in the world and build a company and go and change the world? Go and do that idea you had. There was no such thing as online market research before.

Shane Skillen: 05:50

We actually became the 1st market research company online on earth. There's many now, but we were the very first one. And And because of that one lucky conversation I had with Givir, we were able to build our whole company and we started doing something more meaningful. So 24 years later, we're working with a lot of different clients. We have over 200 clients with some of the biggest brands, got a 150 staff.

Shane Skillen: 06:12

Last year, we did work in 45 different countries and we just got valued at 145, not 1,000, 1,000,000. That's a typo. Yeah. It's a 140 we got a $145,000,000 valuation a few weeks ago. And our main purpose is to help global brands grow using market research and digital media.

Shane Skillen: 06:30

It's been amazing for us. It's been very fulfilling for me in my life. The entrepreneur journey has been amazing. The impact we have in the world has been amazing. Figure we touch every year about 3,000,000,000 lives, because we work with companies like Coke, Google, TikTok, Facebook.

Shane Skillen: 06:45

And when you do that, you touch a lot of human life and it's very fulfilling. So just getting in a little bit about what we do, it's about feelings. And why this matters to you, is because as you're building your networks and creating your luck, it's very important how you make people feel. And I luckily summoned on this video from Apple, which wasn't really on the public domain, because of someone in my network. I was asking for examples of how feelings mattered.

Shane Skillen: 07:08

And they're like, well, I've got this cool video on Apple that reveals their biggest secret. And Apple's very, very secretive about their secrets. As I'm sure you all know, but they put this out at a developer conference 1 year. Cool. So anyone see their secret?

Shane Skillen: 07:29

Yes. You're right. Way to go. So Apple is all about how they want to make people feel. So it doesn't matter where you run into the brand, it's written into all of their briefs.

Shane Skillen: 07:39

And I've talked to people that used to work there, and it's true, they sit it's the very top of the paper, delight, surprise, connection, and love. It doesn't matter if it's a store, a device, an app, a Genius Bar experience, the way the phone rings, the way it operates, they focus on this emotion. And why that is, is because human beings make all of our decisions based on emotion. Everything that you do starts the subconscious urge to do it, and then your rational brain is later recruited to allow or deny it. Why Apple is the world's most valuable company, because they're so emotional, they create such irrational, emotional demand for their product.

Shane Skillen: 08:16

And that's actually what my company is focused on. Hot specs. So we spent a few $1,000,000 making this emotional map about 10 years ago. And so, what we found is we started with 5,000 different emotional words, and we boiled it down to these 88 that are highly predictive of behavior. If I just ask if you're going to buy a Toyota or buy the new Apple phone, it's about 65% predictive of what you do.

Shane Skillen: 08:38

But if I can use this tool to measure how you feel about it, I can predict with 91% accuracy if you're actually going to buy or not. So what you see here is some phenomenon. In the middle of that map there, happy, satisfied, warm, pleasure, liking, love, trust, grateful, those are core emotions. Every brand or product needs to make people feel those things. You need to make people feel those things.

Shane Skillen: 08:58

If you do not make people feel those things, they will not help you. You will not be strengthening your network. If you're just sending form emails to people because you think you want to get their references or have interviews with them, so you can get the job you want, they will sense this. They will not make feel that way about you and they will not help you. If you make them feel that, they'll help you.

Shane Skillen: 09:16

And then what we help brands do is figure out where on the map, where to position themselves. But you can see on the end, on the edges of the map, in the black space, those are negative emotions. Negative emotions are 3 times more powerful than positive emotions, so you want to, avoid those. So what we start doing is we start mapping different things. There's 3 different examples of what Campbell's Soup feels like to a 1000 Americans.

Shane Skillen: 09:39

Good core, a lot of hot core emotions. That that one down there is so funny being at Ivy with a Starbucks in it. When I went to school, and thank you for saying I looked young, there was no such thing as Starbucks. Did not exist yet. But right now, that's how people feel about Starbucks.

Shane Skillen: 09:53

You can see it's got some negative emotion around that left. I think pretentious and arrogant. And then down on the bottom after b p's oil spill, that's how people felt about it. Now, thanks to the amazing lunch that I had today, I'm actually showing you how people feel about different people. This is how people feel about Arlene Dickinson, my friend.

Shane Skillen: 10:13

And you can see, there's a good core, That's the knowledgeable thing up top, inspiring, not too many negative emotions around it versus Kevin O'Leary, totally different story. Lots of negative emotions. So, you know, you want to make people feel good stuff, and if you do a good job, even in 20 years, they'll help you. Here's another really cool ad from Apple. I think you'll see it delivers on those 4 core emotions.

Shane Skillen: 10:37

Much more exciting and it's very hard to get because they just aired it at a developer conference. But because of the luck I was able to create with my network, I get stuff like this. Cool. Good ad? Like it?

Shane Skillen: 10:51

I saw a lot of you smiling. Again, they triggered those 4 emotions. You might have felt them throughout that. That is why Apple is so good. It's great.

Shane Skillen: 10:59

I love working in advertising. You know, you want to like it's funny, we're just advertising professionals. We're like one level above used car salesman, in terms of how much you trust us. But advertising, if you turned it all off, Deloitte calculated 17% of the economy would disappear. Thus putting us in a great depression.

Shane Skillen: 11:16

So I think all of Western society owes us, all advertising professionals, a round of applause. But I don't want a round of applause. We could do cool stuff like this too. I'm going to need to feel some different emotions here with something we helped sick kids with, where they needed a 1,000,000,000 5 to make a new hospital. We used our map, we found that most charities, 1,000,000,000 5, by the way, is unprecedented for a Canadian charity to have to raise.

Shane Skillen: 11:38

And the cause was so amazing, because it's going to save thousands of kids' lives. The new technology that's gonna be there, it's gonna, you know, be around for a long time. You know, the insight from market research was a lot of charities are really focused on sad and sickness and pulling at those heartstrings. And we revealed through the modeling that we do, the econometric modeling that we do, that there's a new space up in there being a leader, brave, inspiring and passionate. And as a result of that, an amazing creative agency called Cassette was able to make this ad called Versus.

Shane Skillen: 12:12

This is good. You like that? Yeah. I hope I'm getting claps over here from the ad, even. Yeah.

Shane Skillen: 12:17

So really, really good ad. It worked. They raised $200,000,000 more than they thought they needed. They raised 1.7 $1,000,000,000. And the insight what we're able to help them with is create an ad like that, where you create the disease as being the enemies and the kids being able to fight it, And it unified people around a cause.

Shane Skillen: 12:35

And it was the most successful fundraising campaign in Canadian history. And actually just one global ad campaign of the decade. So what should I share with you more than I've shared already? You think about I've been thinking about it for, you know, a few weeks now and talking to a bunch of different people. And again, what I really want to focus on is this question of, you know, what drives entrepreneurial success?

Shane Skillen: 13:00

Does anybody know what it is? I've said it already a few times. You guys can't answer. What drives entrepreneurial success? Luck.

Shane Skillen: 13:08

It's luck. And so luck is this interesting thing where, what is it? And this is Seneca. Does anyone know who Seneca is? Put your hand up if you know who Seneca is.

Shane Skillen: 13:17

Of course, Max knows who Seneca is. You know who Seneca is? Probably one of the smartest human beings to ever live. And his notion of what luck means is where preparation meets opportunity. And through everything I've been through, I could not agree more.

Shane Skillen: 13:32

The lucky things that have happened to me, there's been dozens of them. The lucky things that have happened to me is where you have an opportunity and you're prepared to deliver on that opportunity. And, it sucks if you can't. And, it happened to me a few times, where you screw up the opportunity, so so you prepare more and you prepare more. So that when those opportunities arise, you're able to rise to the challenge.

Shane Skillen: 13:53

So here's a little model for you. I know everyone likes models. You like your opportunities on the bottom, your preparation there. If you do neither, you will waste your life. And sorry to be dramatic, you literally will waste your life.

Shane Skillen: 14:05

You spend 20 hours a week on TikTok, that is where you're gonna be, and you will regret it. And it's very tempting to be on TikTok, and you see all these great algorithms, you get all this dopamine, but don't do it. You're gonna waste your life. In fact, I would say you're all richer than I am and I'm sure I'm very financially wealthy, but what you've got that I don't have is your time. You've got about 24 years more time than I have and that's your wealth right now.

Shane Skillen: 14:30

The time that you've got in front of you. If you waste it, it's like wasting money is one thing, wasting time is even worse. Don't waste your time. It's the wealth that you have right now. Use the wealth of time to create your own luck.

Shane Skillen: 14:45

Get smarter, get better, prepare, and create more opportunities for yourself. Waste of chances, waste of time, and if you go there and you're preparing well and maximizing your opportunities, you will increase your luck, which will increase your success, which hopefully will increase your happiness. That make sense? You all understand that? Fantastic.

Shane Skillen: 15:04

Alright. So in terms of your preparation, a few pointers here. If I were to recommend you some things to to read, or to listen to, That's the best that I've got. That Sapiens book is a really good understanding, just all of humanity. TED Talks is the best book I've ever read on public speaking.

Shane Skillen: 15:21

You should get good at public speaking. It's very important. Even if you're not on stage doing exactly what I'm doing right now, you should try to get good at telling stories. Your ability to tell stories, especially now that we're ending this era of AI, is going to be important. You can use AI to help you tell stories, but if you tell stories, you'll make people feel better, you'll be more memorable, you're going to increase your luck.

Shane Skillen: 15:41

I love this all in podcast. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I love the all in podcast. I love reading the Wall Street Journal. Morning Brief every morning.

Shane Skillen: 15:50

There's a lot of stuff out there. I find that it's the best summary of what's going on in the world and just knowing that when I go into situations, I feel like I'm well prepared to talk to anybody. CFO having lunch with the CEO of Air Canada next week. And I am totally confident in my ability to have a very successful meeting with that CEO because I read stuff, I listen to stuff, I'm always preparing, I'm always sharpening my saw. And I love The Economist.

Shane Skillen: 16:15

They still recommend reading The Economist at Ivy. They do. Because I'm that's where I was told to do this, in Ivy, 24 years ago, read The Economist. And I think I've read every single one for the last 24 years. So learn, focus on how many people feel, and I'm gonna get into this a little bit later, but I think you need to get a cold calling job.

Shane Skillen: 16:34

And you think about some of the most important things that have happened to me, this cold calling job I'll tell you a story about in a bit, was that. Anybody know who this is? Very close. Jensen. Yeah.

Shane Skillen: 16:44

You got it. So, he said this, I found this on the All In podcast, because remember, I'm always trying to maximize my luck, so I'm always learning. What he's going to say right here, a few weeks ago to Stanford, a Stanford class, is like, I can't believe you just said that, but it's so important. It's exactly what you need to hear if you want to be an entrepreneur.

Jensen Huang: 17:02

People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And, unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you. I was fortunate that I grew up with my parents providing a condition for us to be successful on the one hand, but there were plenty of plenty of opportunities for setbacks and suffering. And to this day, I use the word the phrase pain and suffering inside our company with great glee.

Jensen Huang: 17:28

And the reason and I mean that. You know, boy, this is gonna cause a lot of pain and suffering. And I mean that in a happy way, because because you wanna train you wanna refine the character of your company. You want the you want greatness out of them. And greatness is not intelligence, as you know.

Jensen Huang: 17:45

Greatness comes from character. Character isn't isn't formed out of smart people. It's formed out of people who suffered.

Shane Skillen: 17:52

Right. So saying people need to suffer. Right? I totally agree. So as I, you know, I'll tell you a few things about Ivy.

Shane Skillen: 17:59

So when I first applied to Ivy, I didn't get in. I thought I'd get in, but I was sitting in a Bay Street job in an investment bank in the corporate finance department, doing the job that people go to Ivy to go and get, and then I found out that I didn't get in. I was devastated. It was probably the most disappointing thing that ever happened in my life. So I called.

Shane Skillen: 18:18

I said, you know, how did this happen? I, I, I I'm doing the job that everyone wants to do. How come you're not gonna let me in? They're like, yeah. You know, we're just not letting you in.

Shane Skillen: 18:30

So I sent them a whole rebuttal to to, like, have them let me in. I made them a 100 page PowerPoint presentation for everything I was doing, everything I was gonna go and do. I know what mattered to them about, starting salaries. I'm like, I will get a the biggest starting salary out of Ivy. Before I was sure I wanted to be an entrepreneur, And they wrote called me back.

Shane Skillen: 18:48

The dean called me back and said, Shane, you had 17 spelling mistakes in your application. There's no way we're letting you in this year. But, if you apply next year, we'll let you in. I was like, alright. The reason why I had 17 spelling mistakes is because I was in love with a girl, young love, and she went to Europe and we were technically on a break, name is Jenny.

Shane Skillen: 19:08

We're on a break and called me Christmas, telling me she was in love with a Greek God, which was heartbreaking for me. I a few weeks later, I took her up to go get her and reclaim my love for her, And, I was successful. Except, right before I went to Europe, I had to write my Ivy application. It was one of the things I had to do. I just wrote it, didn't spell check it, put it in, why didn't get Ivy the first time.

Shane Skillen: 19:34

So I was super disappointed. Then this is not my wife, by the way. I've been very happily married to someone else for about 20 years that I met shortly after graduating Ivy. I bought her a dance studio between 1st and second year Ivy. And back then, Scotiabank would give us $40,000.

Shane Skillen: 19:52

No questions asked. You're an Ivy. You're gonna be a good credit risk. Here's $40. Spend however you want.

Shane Skillen: 19:58

I spent it on a dance studio for this girlfriend of mine, because all she wanted to do was be a dance instructor. What a mistake that was. Lost all the money within 2 months, we're broke, and then I had to go get a door to door sales job just to pay our rent. And I started selling natural gas contracts for direct energy door to door while I was in London. And that was probably the most important job that I ever had.

Shane Skillen: 20:24

Because it was toil, it was rejection, it was learning, and it was getting back up after because you literally 98% of all the doors you go to slam the door in your face or say they don't want it or they're not interested. And just that act of getting used to going and looking another human being in the face and trying to sell them something and getting feedback and then trying it again and then trying it again and then trying it again was probably the most important thing that I did. Because when you're going to be an entrepreneur, there's a lot of that. There's a lot of that disappointment and the resilience that you need, as Jensen said, from NVIDIA, is so important. I would actually recommend that all of you either go do door to door sales for a charity or get a direct selling cold calling job.

Shane Skillen: 21:08

So you're calling people, trying to trying to sell them things. And it will be more advantageous and beneficial to your entrepreneurial career than almost anything else you're going to do. I mean, IV cases were great, because they taught me how to think. But just being able to go into something, get rejected and learn and try it again, all came. Thanks to my girlfriend Jenny, who's not my wife.

Shane Skillen: 21:29

So very few people tell you this, I can tell you it's totally true. You have to follow-up. If you're going to your network, you're going to the Alumni Network, I've coached a lot of Ivy kids about how to get their dream job, they go to the Alumni Network and they ask, and they're like, they didn't get back to me. I'm like, well, how many times did you follow-up? They're like, I I didn't follow-up.

Shane Skillen: 21:47

Or twice. I'm like, well, you've got to follow-up 5 to 12 times to actually get people to respond to you. And you think that it's annoying people that you're following up, but it's not. Particularly, Ivy and Business people, we like want that. Like you want to see that tenacity.

Shane Skillen: 22:03

You want to see that like, I want this, this is important to me, this matters. You're not going to piss someone off by following up. Keep following up, and your ability to not do that is very important for your entrepreneurial success. It's a good quote, I don't know who said it. I think Edison said it, you know, people that give up had no idea how close they were to success.

Shane Skillen: 22:23

Usually it happens from not following up. So, opportunities, network properly, focus on feelings, minimize your social media and screen time, and then the friends that you have. And I'll talk about each of these really quickly. So when we were trying to raise money, we went out to all the VCs in Toronto, we wrote our business plan for Hotspots, we're going to be an online market research company, and it was really hard to get meetings. And then we got a meeting with the best VC at the time in Toronto.

Shane Skillen: 22:49

And all my friends were like, you're so lucky. How did you get it? Like, well, we called them 6 times, we sent in emails about 40 times, and then you're like, think about it. Okay. How am I going to maximize my luck in this situation?

Shane Skillen: 23:02

So with a low, low price of $50, I was able to rent a gorilla suit and take the business plan into the Venture Capital office, walked into the front desk and guess what happens when you show up in a gorilla suit with a business plan? They walk you right into the partners meeting. It's incredible. And so that's not that big a deal. Maybe it's a little bit creative, but I don't think it is.

Shane Skillen: 23:22

I think it's just, it's a way to actually create and build your own luck. And I see this stuff all the time now, where people try to do things to break through and be interesting. Also, I want to talk to you about social media. I've got, you know, a lot of experience with this. TikTok used to be a client of ours.

Shane Skillen: 23:38

We do a lot of work with Google. We do a lot of work with Meta and Facebook and Instagram. These these are very, very sophisticated algorithms. They're designed to suck your attention away from you and take that that wealth that you have right now, the time that you have, and rob you of it. And, you almost don't even know that you're on it.

Shane Skillen: 23:58

But, you're on it, you all have your screen time on your phones, You don't need to look at them right now, but if you looked at the screen time on your phones, you need to decide if you're happy with the amount of time that you're spending on Instagram, that you're spending on TikTok, and is that really how you wanna be spending your time? And just remember, when things like this come out, if you're not paying for it, you are the product. So these systems are designed to maximize your attention on platform, make you feel like you're not wasting time. My kids would come to me with with stuff they would learn. They'd be like, dad, did you know that that chlorophyll is what's in all the plants and makes it green and actually does photosynthesis?

Shane Skillen: 24:35

I'm like, you're like 9, how do you know that? Like, TikTok. You're like, TikTok. How does TikTok know that? And when you think about what TikTok's done, the AI in the program has seen kids disappear off of TikTok.

Shane Skillen: 24:48

But the kids who disappear less often are kids that say that stuff to their parents. So like, if we, through AI, and don't even know that it's doing this, feed kids interesting stuff that they tell their parents about science or math or space or the world, The parents don't take their TikTok away. So then it's just this big, I hate to say, but evil engine that is just designed to steal your time. So you guys decide how you wanna spend your time. I can't tell you enough times.

Shane Skillen: 25:14

You've got a lot of wealth right now and all the time that you have. And if you're gonna spend some of the time you can be spending preparing and creating more opportunities for yourself on social media, I suggest you don't do that. The friendships that you have are also super important. And what happens, I can say I'm 24 years graphic, maybe keeping those social ties together becomes difficult. People move, people get into different friend group structures, people get into different types of careers.

Shane Skillen: 25:44

The ability for you to keep and maintain the relationships that you create right here is one massive way you're gonna maximize your number of opportunities. Because deep relationships in fact, it's like the most important thing in life are your friendships and your relationships. Although, we've studied emotions a lot. And I would say that it's not me saying this is what science says, is your relationships are what matter most of all, particularly the ones that you have at university. And I saw when I came in here this evening, this afternoon, you guys were all sitting by yourselves.

Shane Skillen: 26:14

And I, I think that's a waste. I think you took that opportunity to sit beside someone else that was sitting alone, you didn't sit beside them. You didn't do that because you're not used to doing that. You don't know that it's important, but it is important because you could have made a new friend. Even if you didn't make a new friend, you could have sat beside someone and added them to LinkedIn.

Shane Skillen: 26:30

Who knows, their sister's brother's cousin could have been the hiring manager for that job you really want or that client you really want later on down the road. So if you see someone sitting by themselves and you're like a little bit nervous to approach them and ask them, you know, to be your friend, you don't do that. You just sit beside and you say, hey, you know, my name is what's your name? You say their name. Say, you know, what are you really excited about right now?

Shane Skillen: 26:51

And they are going to go into something they love talking about because they're excited about it. You're going to learn something new from them and you're gonna start to build a little bit of relationship with each other. So that's an opportunity wasted if you come into a place like this, particularly a place like this. You all wanna go and be entrepreneurs. You're all trying to wire yourself to be successful as entrepreneurs.

Shane Skillen: 27:09

Don't sit by yourself. So in review, if you maximize your opportunities and you maximize your preparation, you will maximize your what? Yes, your luck, Amazing. And is that that should make sense to you, is that this luck thing is important. You can create it yourself.

Eric Morse: 27:29

The Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by Quantum Shift 2008 alum Connie Clarice and Closing the Gap Healthcare Group. To ensure you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player or visit entrepreneurship.uw0.capodcast. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.