#startinganamazonbusiness

[hackandgrow]

Should You Be Friends With Your Employees?

So we've got um a lot of people who uh make great leaders but are not great managers and a lot of people that are great managers that are not great people. I think I could tell you the biggest mistake and this is like the biggest tell that somebody is an amateur manager, is when they try to be friends with their employees. That's like the kiss of death. When you know, we in back you know, I invented the Vapir vaporizer, the forerunner of all digital vaporization technology, all the vapes that you see and I remember we had hired a guy who's a super nice guy and this guy comes in first day and I'm just watching him and he did great in the interviews and then I'm watching him with the employees and he's just trying to make nice with everybody and I'm like okay, well, that's cool. 

It's his first day and then by day two, he's like really trying to be friends. He's like buying him coffee and like you know, doing that stuff and I was like, man, I can time this one on my watch. This is not going to go well and sure enough he imploded and we had to get another guy but you can always tell because one of the things I you know, I tell people now that are in management positions is that you are not going to gain respect of your employees by them being your friends. They will, it will actually have the opposite effect, right? 

They don't necessarily need to fear you, although in some cases that's not really a bad thing as long as it's not unreasonable fear. But they need to respect you and there's a big difference and they will appreciate you more if they respect you and that's what we teach. But it's a really easy way to catch a new manager and  one that's you know, one that's experienced is the one that's experienced will get in head down to the nose. He'll be reasonable, he'll be fair, he'll be compassionate, you know, he'll go out of his way to hear the employees, but by no means this dude having a tequila with them after work.

[hackandgrow]

Think Outside The Money Box To Create Wealth

I believe that if you follow good sound financial principles, you think outside the box and you can survive if you hack and grow rich, like is the title of our show Bart, you can get wealthy while everybody else is struggling to just get by. And this happens in every economy. You look at the turn of the century, you look at the 1930s, the dust bowl, we had a lot of repeats of what's happening now. If I was, in fact I was looking at some footage of the 1930s, of the great depression and the depression era and you watch those videos and the crazy thing is that a lot of that stuff is coming back like, people moving out of their houses into these tiny homes like because it was boho chic, but yet you save money. 

That's happening now. There's a whole tiny house movement. You see people living out of their cars and these encampments that happened during the great depression. And then you see people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and all these people that we talk about with this enormous wealth and then there's a whole another group of people that are creating mega wealth. I know a lot of the guys that you and I know and and have hung out with have companies that are valued in the billions with a B. If you remember, like in the 1990s, nothing sold for a billion. I mean no company, certainly no tech company sold in the billions for it with a B. No startup tech company. Of course, the giants were probably had that valuation, but now it's like there's unicorns everywhere. There's so many companies that have sold for a billion or more, even wacky little companies where you're like oh, that sold for a billion and there's a huge amount of wealth being created. So ultimately I think you have to make a choice on where you want to be when hits the fan. 

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[hackandgrow]

Can You Get Things Done?

There are two major themes that I picked up. There one is the adaptability theme and I love this. This is so key for negotiation as well. Um it's really important to plan and prepare and have everything done and build your fundamental skill set and all that kind of stuff. But if you're not adaptable, it's the way that the negotiation moves and shapes, then you'll lose out on a lot of value. In fact there's an academic. His name's Michael Wheeler. I believe he's a professor at Harvard. He wrote a book about the the the implications or or like negotiation is almost like jazz. Good negotiations is almost like jazz music. 

How some musicians are playing off of each other and at the end you get this beautiful piece of music. But no one knew what they were getting into prior to that music being played. Yes, they knew what they were doing. They had good fundamental skill sets. They had practiced a great deal but the the music that came out at the end was a result of the back and forth between both parties to liken that to business and negotiation I think is brilliant and the other thing that you mentioned there was this mindset of being focused about driving towards getting getting it done. I love that you said. 

Your  best isn't good enough because I there is something that someone once said and i can't remember who it is so forgive me. If I quote this if someone listens to it let me know who it is but they said the best you can do is not all you can do. There's a difference between those two things because for example if I said to you you know get on a pull-up bar and do five pull-ups you may do two and that's the best you can do right now but is it all you can do? If you rest for five seconds maybe you can do another two. If you rest for another five seconds maybe you can do another three and next week you're going to be able to do 10 right? So the best you can do is not all you can do. So making sure that people understand that you yes you need to try your best but remember that's not all you can do. You can do more than that. It's so key for people to understand.