You are not a victim. That's right. You're not a victim.
You can't be if you want to be successful at business, successful in sports,
or successful in life. Hey, now it's Dave Lorenzo.
This is the Saturday Side Hustle here on the Inside BS show.
I'm solo today because it's Saturday.
We'll be back with Nikki g next week to do the Inside BSS show that you've come
to expect. But today's Saturday side hustle is all about your attitude.
Your attitude is everything if you want to be successful in business,
life and sports.
And the reason I'm doing this show today is because I had a couple
of things presented to me this week that really
drew me in to let me understand the
mindset of people who make it as entrepreneurs versus the
mindset of people who don't make it as entrepreneurs or the mindset of people
who could never be entrepreneurs in the first place. Let me tell you the first
thing that caught my eye and see if it resonates with you.
So I post on LinkedIn every day
and this week I'm really focused on posting written content in
addition to the videos that I've put out.
And I happen to think to myself, well,
this particular video that I'm posting on LinkedIn,
it probably would be good for my Facebook audience.
So I'm going to also try posting it on Facebook to see if it resonates.
And I happened to see one of my friends on Facebook
who was traveling and
something came up and there was a mistake
that this person made in their travels,
and they decided to make a video about it,
and they made themselves into a victim in the video.
And I was so taken aback because I'm thinking to myself,
okay,
so you made the mistake with the travel. You screwed up
and you're trying to garner sympathy as a victim because of your
mistake.
That's not something that resonates with successful
people victimhood.
It's something that successful people reject because when
you're successful and bad things happen to you, you adjust.
You want an example, I'll give you an example from the world of sports.
Jim Abbott. Look him up.
Those of you who are Gen Xers or Gen Xers,
Jim Abbott was a pitcher pitched in several different major
league organizations with one arm. That's right.
He was a one armed pitcher. He pitched a no-hitter for the New York Yankees.
He had every reason to act like a victim,
yet he didn't. He persevered. He worked on his grit.
And he's one of only a handful of people in the history of
Major league baseball to pitch a no hitter,
and he did it with one arm.
So if you're out there and you've had to run a bad luck,
you lost a few clients or you lost your job,
that sucks. I feel horrible that that happened to you.
But you have two routes you can take.
Route number one is you can feel sorry for yourself and you could say,
woe is me.
And you can literally cry in your beer every night telling anyone
who will listen, what a victim you are.
Route number two is the Jim Abbott route,
and that's the route where you figure out what you need to do
to be successful. What's successful entrepreneurs do?
They figure it out. All along the way,
things happen. Roadblocks pop up,
funding sources dry up, clients go away,
suppliers go bankrupt. Pandemics happen.
And you know what successful entrepreneurs find a
way. Now, look,
if you belong to a peer group like Vistage or EO
or the exit success lab that Nikki g and I are putting together,
those things are lifesavers when
stuff happens to you as an entrepreneur,
but you can't show yourself being a victim on
social media, not because of what the world will think about you,
but because of the mindset it creates in you.
You are never a victim because if you're a victim, you're somebody who,
things happen to somebody who doesn't recover.
You're not a victim, you're an entrepreneur, you improvise, you adjust,
you adapt.
I had to teach this lesson to my 12 year old daughter.
She's a volleyball player and she's worked hard.
She played volleyball all last year. She played on a club team,
she played on her school team. She's taken lessons, she's working hard,
she's getting better.
But there are other kids who've been playing for years and years and years
longer than she's been playing. So in her club team,
she didn't make the top tier team, she didn't make the second tier team.
She made the third tier team, and she's very upset about that.
And she thought it was unfair. And I said to her,
are the players on these other teams?
Are all those players on the other two tiers of teams better than you?
And she said, yes. And I said,
then it is fair because sports like life is a Meritocracy.
And even if it was unfair,
even if you were better than two or three of the players on one of the other
teams, you didn't demonstrate that effectively enough.
And that sometimes happens in life.
Sometimes the best person in life doesn't get the deal because they didn't do a
good job of pitching themselves or because they didn't do a good job of
explaining their value proposition. So this past week,
my daughter found out that she was on her school,
has an A team and a B team for the middle school folks.
And she found out that she had made the A team and she had her first game
yesterday and she didn't get any playing time.
And she came in the car and she was so upset. I didn't get any playing time,
I didn't get any playing time. And I said,
the starting six were really, really good. I said,
and the one person who subs the defensive sub called the Libero,
that's what it's called in volleyball. The Libero defensive sub is really,
really good. And she said, but the Libero is brand new and I'm brand new.
And the Libero had never played volleyball. I'd been playing for a year.
And I said, yes,
but the Libero is a natural athlete and she made several great plays.
I said,
you have to demonstrate in practice that you are aggressive,
that you're going to outwork everyone, that you're going to out hustle them,
that you're going to work on your talent because you're not there at a talent
level yet,
that you're going to work hard to improve your talent level so that you deserve
to be on the court. And she said, yeah, but dad,
I did that last week in practice. I said, yes,
that's why you made this team in the first place. Now to get off the bench,
you're going to have to demonstrate that consistently over and over and over
again.
You're going to have to consistently demonstrate that you have that and you're
going to have to demonstrate that you're improving your skills,
you're improving your talent,
and once the coaches are satisfied that you've done that,
they're going to give you a shot. And when they give you a shot,
if you screw up,
you're going to be right back on the bench and you may never get another shot.
And that's exactly what life is like.
That's exactly what life is like as an entrepreneur. Except as entrepreneurs,
we always believe that we're going to get another shot.
We always believe there's another opportunity.
So you have something as an entrepreneur that you need to
rely on,
and it's the exact opposite of being a victim and that's having a
burning desire.
Your burning desire manifests itself in three ways.
The first way is that you're willing to do more work than everyone else.
If you really have a burning desire, you're going to do more work.
And that's the quantity of your effort is better than your
competitors.
The second way burning desire manifests itself is in the quality
of your effort. More intensity. You're going to bring more focus.
You're going to do your research ahead of time to get your Marketing message
exactly right, and the intensity is going to be there.
So that's the quality of the effort.
And the third way your burning desire manifests itself is in grit.
Your ability to keep coming back no matter what life throws at you,
your ability to keep coming back,
no matter how many times you go broke your ability to come back.
No matter how many times you hear no when you're selling.
If you want to be successful at anything in life,
particularly at entrepreneurship,
you have to become a savage. I love this word.
Think about what a savage is.
It's somebody who just puts forth raw, unadulterated effort,
somebody who's out there battling every single day.
Your success as an entrepreneur is completely
dependent on your ability just to keep coming back.
Your savage nature is what's going to make you successful in
entrepreneurship, and it's what's going to make you successful in life.
I'm Dave Lorenzo. This is the Saturday side Hustle,
and we'll see you savages back here tomorrow for the Sunday
Special.