Launching a business is as easy as they say if you have the right information. I decided to launch one in the music industry without any knowledge of how to start or keep it alive. These are the top 3 lessons from that experience.
Chapter 1 – Comparisons
At a low point in my life, when there were no cars around, I used to drive with my eyes completely closed.
I feel like almost everyone will eventually ask themselves, “what do I really want to do in life?” The question comes at different times for every person, some people may not even have to ask themselves that, but when they do, finding that answer becomes everything. For me, that didn’t happen until about four years ago when I decided my goal would be to change music forever. Let me explain.
That’s me at the end of 2021 interviewing a 23-year-old rapper who helps care for his grandmother and three-year-old along with his girlfriend.
I always remember it being really hard to hold a conversation when I was younger so this is a massive step for me. I get by telling people what I thought would make them happy, which I knew wouldn’t get me far. And so, in an attempt to get more comfortable talking in general, YouTube was the result.
I’d start and end up making content that no one cared about for years. It wasn’t too long until I started to compare myself to the bigger YouTubers, which killed my drive. But it wasn’t the views. It was more wanting to make content on that same level and not look immature. So after failing and failing, I realized I wasn’t good at this.
But that’s when this happened.
One way to use comparisons when launching a business.
So many of you probably know of Elliott Kipchoge already, and that imitating his incredible pace is hard for even professional runners. I found it inspiring that this unsuspecting man could do this, and with new motivation, I thought I was good to go. But me being me, of course, that wasn’t the case.
4 a.m. Why wake up at 4 a.m.? Well, naively, I started running more than I previously did, attempting to replicate that insane pace of 13 miles per hour.
What the fuck was I thinking?
I’ve never even come close to that pace and trying actually taught me a huge lesson. You’ll see that this video has three goals. One is to help anyone starting a business or anyone just taking the next step in life and struggling with the same things that I struggle with.
The first thing is how to use comparisons.
Comparisons should be used as motivation, showing you what someone is capable of and not what you can’t do.
The easiest way to explain this is that everyone has inspiration, and for a lot of people, myself included, it often comes in the form of a person. Growing up and thinking, “I want to be like that.” And then you give yourself these goals to achieve by a certain age. And when you don’t hit those goals, that inspiration quickly becomes discouraging.
This hit me hard, and like I said, I was nowhere near that pace and never will be, but I did have a secret weapon, a word that changed my life, started this channel, and one that I’m still learning to master. And that’s perspective.
A mental view or a prospect, put simply, your outlook or attitude towards something.
While I was watching everything Kipchoge, trying to memorize his running form, the narrator said that he’s been running miles since he was very young, running to school – elementary school. So the man has been running for more than 40* years competitively, for more than 20* years. And I’ve been running casually since 2016, about 6 years. And the difference was blatant.
It was obvious. The work that he’s put in since he was a kid made him capable of that pace, not me. And I knew I’d never hit that pace, but if you or I were to put in that same work ethic for 40 years, who knows, right?
The point is that I now fully understood that anything I wanted to get I could get with the proper amount of work. This allowed me to look at my channel differently. If I wanted to make videos like the ones that inspired me then I had to put in the proper amount of work and I was cool with the effort, but I couldn’t even comprehend the cost.
This is when I ran into my second problem and second lesson.
Chapter 2 – Money
Okay. Money is really something. Especially when launching a business. It can be an obstacle in life, or it can be used to build something. For most of us, it’s both. And as you will see here, obstacles normally come before the build. For example, starting this initial project, the magazine with the interviews.
Launching a business cost money, but only as much as you really need. No more.
The equipment I got on this trip alone included:
4x Sony a6400s
4x lenses
4x 128 gigabyte SD cards
2x battery packs
1x laptop,
1x backpack
&the warranties
Spending just over $7,000. That’s just a fraction of what the entire project costs.
I still had to buy microphones for the interviews and performances, pay for the studio, my team, and the laptop couldn’t even edit the videos. It had to be replaced with a $4,477 Mac. Between this and the other business. I’ve tried. I’ve spent a little over $20,000.
Keep in mind this equipment is expensive, I originally started with way cheaper gear for beginners, as most should when launching a business for the first time.
Yes. There’s so much I would do differently, but I can’t say that I regret it because it got me to this point. As you can see, my relationship with money wasn’t that great. That needed to change. Luckily I came across Grant Cardone, the billionaire business owner and investor in a podcast saying this.
Grant Cardone on the mindset of launching a business
$51 million worth of debt. That’s what I had in 2008. The bank called me and said, “We need the whole 51 million or we’re going to seize your property.”
The 10X rule basically is – I’m going to have half a billion dollars worth of debt the next time and the bank will be my friend. When COVID happened, I owed $1.4 billion to the banks. 12 years ago, that’s 30 times what I owed. The day COVID happened, the economy shut down. The world started going crazy. Dude, I had six banks call me in one day, “Mr. Cardon, we’d like to come to your office and see how we can help you work through this.”
Get big, baby. Okay. It’s the 10X Rule, man. The 10X rule says go big or go bigger. Never go home, man. Ain’t nothing at home. Ain’t nothing at home.
“Go big or go bigger”
To say I was nervous to try launching a business is an understatement. But after hearing this, I thought being nervous to launch a business ten times bigger would be, well, not an understatement but it [the feeling of being nervous] would be understandable.
What if I took this magazine and thought ten times bigger? Well, that wouldn’t just be a magazine, that would be an entire content platform. We would basically be aiming for Rolling Stone or Double XL or Complex, and we would need a plan.
For many reasons, our goal is to change the music industry, bring equality between creators, bring them new streams of income outside of traditional methods, and make the mainstream industry more inclusive to deserving artists.
This is what you’ll hear in the video but our mission is clear.
The first goal of launching this business is to make mainstream hip hop more helpful than it is hurtful. Let me step in for a second. You’ll see at the end of this video and in our other videos that our goal has become a lot more precise. We really just want to help these artists out there that actually deserve and need the help, and you’ll see how we get them that help. But we don’t want to give away too much in this video, so stay tuned for updates. And let’s get back to this.
We want to make films with musicians about musicians, but not only for musicians, for the people who want to find good music and look a little more into its meaning.
I have the goal in mind and I even had the milestones I need to reach it, but this is when I realized that looking ahead and planning ahead are two completely different things.
Our Launching a Business Checklist
I had to be honest. The fact that I had a lot of growing to do before I could even open a store, let alone change the music industry, and I was not who I needed to be to create the company that I envisioned at this time.
I was still watching those podcasts and came across an interview with a man who went from delivering pizzas at 26-year-old to a millionaire in his mid-thirties by launching multiple businesses and investing properly. His name is Dan Henry, and here’s what he had to say.
Dan Henry on the mindset of launching a business
How old were you when you sold pizza?
When we stopped selling pizzas, maybe 24, 25, 26.
So I’m guessing the guy stiffs you. You’re walking up and down, you’re like, yo, I’m better than this.
That’s a big misconception I think a lot of people have is that I’m better than this. And the truth is, you have the potential to be better than this, but you have to tap into it. You have to make that decision to read that book, to take that action to do those things. Because if you were better than this, you wouldn’t be working there. You have the potential to be better.
So you have the realization like, yo, I am. I’m not the person that I need to be right first.
Exactly. I would buy book after book after book. And, you know, I think a lot of us do this. We buy a book and we ask ourselves, what am I going to read this book? And then we don’t read the book. And then we ask ourselves again, when are we going to read a book? When we’re going to read a book. Eventually, that book collects dust. And I did that.
For instance, here’s another misconception. People say, Well, here’s how you can build confidence. There is no way to build confidence anyway. Anybody that tells you that you can build confidence is a complete liar. They don’t know what they’re talking about. And I’ll tell you why. You build competence and as a byproduct of competence, you get confidence. And that’s the hard truth of it.”
Did you know that in 2019, studies showed the number of people that stopped reading after high school was 33% and college grads were even higher at 44%? I was one of those people, and frankly, seeing all those words on that page made me nauseous, but anyway, I needed to read. Luckily, in the second book that I picked up, I came across this final lesson in this video, and that’s the 200 foot rule.
Chapter 3 – 200ft Rule
Now, this rule is from a book called The Secret by Rhonda Bryant. While this book is great. It’s about manifestation and the law of attraction. I would take everything with a bit of soul. Remember everything you want. You got to work for. Things just don’t pop into existence. This book doesn’t really talk about working too much.
The lesson goes like this:
Think of a car driving through the. The headlights only go 100 to 200 feet forward. But you can go all the way from California to New York driving in the dark because all you have to see is the next 200 feet.
That’s how life tends to unfold before us.
If we trust that the next 200 feet will just unfold after that and the next after that, your life will keep unfolding. And it will eventually get you to the destination of whatever you.
You can see what I mean by work is always required when launching a business. But what this taught me was that I already had a plan. Those milestones that I had before were the perfect plan. I just had to break them down individually and really focus on getting to one point. At a time planning for that individual milestone. And this approach led me to find some mental stability, which led to getting the first members of my team, which led to these interviews, and finally this magazine.
Yeah. I really thought it was going to be that easy, but. No, no, no, no. I fucked up on the first magazine, and on that next one, too. So I have no words for this. You guys are going to see it in the next video. How I had to change directions again because not everything comes that easily. That’s it. I’ll see you guys next video. Launching a business episode 2!
Links
Grant Cardone Interview – https://youtu.be/JBZzHN62SpE
Dan Henry Interview – https://youtu.be/jIW7If7qhXE
