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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Daymond John
Read between
August 18 - August 31, 2019
Wayne Gretzky line, “We miss one hundred percent of the shots we don’t take.”
rise and grind.
It’s got to be pure, got to be real…or else it just won’t work.
I’m giving to you, and you’re giving to me. It’s a partnership: I’m here for you, and you’re here for me. If the authenticity is there, if the business is built on a solid foundation, you’ll have a shot to succeed. If it’s just a superficial enterprise, built on flashy gimmicks, inflated hopes, and a big budget, the odds run a little longer.
today’s buzz words are transparency and authenticity.
It helps to be so hungry you have no choice but to succeed. Better believe it…it helps. It does. Trust me, I know—because that’s where I was coming from when I started FUBU
When you start from a place of nothing much at all, when you’re hungry and laser-focused on succeeding at whatever it is you’re out to do, when you’re flat-out determined to get where you’re going no matter what…well,
Absolutely, there’s tremendous power in being broke. The more you need to succeed, the more likely it is that you will succeed. The more you’ve invested—and here I’m talking about emotional and personal investment, not a financial investment—the more you’ll get back in return.
When does Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky character start to stumble? When he starts throwing all this money around, letting success go to his head, right? When he starts to surround himself with all these luxuries, starts to work out in a plush, cushy gym, sleeps in a nice big bed…that’s when he loses his edge. It’s all right there in the song they use on the
But then he isn’t the underdog anymore. Then he’s the champ, riding high, getting all kinds of endorsement deals, all kinds of distractions. And what happens? He starts to relax a little bit, takes his eyes off the prize, and he gets himself an ass-whupping from Clubber Lang—Mr. T! It isn’t until Rocky goes back to his old
The same goes in business. When you want it, when you need it, you find a way to make good things happen. When you expect it, when you feel entitled to it, you might just be headed for an ass-whupping.
used to keep and share with your friends. All there is, all there will ever be is a new form of delivery, a new way to market, and a new way to figure it out. On Shark Tank we see
“The only way to do great work is to do what you love.” That one’s from Steve Jobs, and it’s been repeated into the ground, but I’m repeating it here because it’s an all-important point. Own it, love it, live it…and you can find a
They’re all hungry and determined. They all practice the power of broke, except in different ways.
Do the math, people: that means 68 percent of the wealthiest people started with nothing.
“I’ve given you every advantage in life except for being disadvantaged.”
fills you with possibilities. On the other side of that, when you grow up privileged, you never hear no, so as soon as those resources are gone, you’re in a tough spot.
It’s all about tapping into the mind-set that finds us when we’re in that place of hunger, that place of desperation…and putting it to work.
He told me he’d hit upon a great way to monetize his work. Somehow, he’d built a platform of over 100,000 Instagram followers, and each week he’d put up an original painting and announce to his followers that the design would be available on a T-shirt for the next twenty-four hours. It was a “one day and one day only” type deal, and off of that he would collect all these preorders for the limited-edition
Turned out there was a market for miniature dog homes, which were popular among super-wealthy homeowners looking to set their pets up in style. Makes sense, I guess. If you’re spending $4–5 million on a house, if you’ve got that kind of money, you wouldn’t blink at a $50,000 or $75,000 or $100,000 price tag for
The reason I’ve grouped these two stories together is to make the point that it doesn’t matter if you’re a digital native like the young artist with the limited-edition T-shirts or digital immigrants like the older couple who kind of stumbled onto the doggie real estate business…the power of broke can be a real force for change. You don’t need a whole lot of resources to change
Steve Aoki, the electro house deejay who’s probably done more to define the techno-music scene than any other
What a lot of people don’t know is that Steve stepped into this spot from an unlikely place. He grew up in Newport Beach, California, the son of Rocky Aoki, another entrepreneur who changed the landscape—he was the founder of the ridiculously
successful Benihana restaurant chain. What this meant for Steve, growing up,
So here’s the thing: When it comes to disruptive technology, there’s always something new. For us, it was the reach and power of hip-hop, magnified by the reach and power of music videos and underlined by the unshakable belief that we were on to something. What’s that you say, Daymond? Hip-hop—a technology? Disruptive? Well, yeah…kinda, sorta. Stay with me on this and you’ll see what I mean.
The disruptive technology I just mentioned? It was in the marriage of hip-hop and music videos, because that’s how we were able to get our shirts on the backs of all these up-and-coming hip-hop artists and make some noise. Getting someone like LL Cool J to wear our gear was like a multimillion-dollar ad campaign for us, and it all came about in an organic way.
Acacia Brinley, growing up in Orange County, California, sites
succeed in the social media space, you can never stop feeding the beast—you must be ever-present, all over it, all the time. And she is. Better believe it, she is.
He went to the event organizers with a proposal. He said, “Look, if I can get ten people to sign up, would you let me in for free?” It was a ballsy, brassy move—one that cost him nothing to make and promised him everything he wanted in return.
what happened next? Well, you can probably guess. Rob recruited those ten other entrants, was waived in for free, and then proceeded to wow the judges and the visiting pros with his fearlessness, his style.
But your brand is you, plain and simple. It’s
what you stand for, how you carry yourself, and it doesn’t cost a thing. Not a penny. You just need to identify it and start living it and put it out there. You’ve got YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, all these different platforms, and they’re all free. The opportunity is there for the taking, so it’s
That’s one of the things I like to ask successful people when we’re brainstorming—I want to know how they’d define themselves, in two to five words, because if you can’t put it out there in a short,
With FUBU, those words were right there in our name—For Us By Us. (That was really our hashtag—back before the term came to mean what it means today.) With Nike, it’s Just Do It! White Castle is What You Crave. Apple is Think Different. Wheaties is Breakfast of Champions. The United States of America: Land of the Free.
For a long time, my two to five words were “I’m on a quest!” I was deep into search mode, trying to learn as much as I could and move myself into as many different arenas as possible.
But the great thing about these mantras is that you can change them up, at any time—and, hey, if you want to keep out in front, stay out there on tha...
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more as an advocate for aspiring entrepreneurs. That’s why I’ve embraced the “People’s Shark” moniker that’s been hung on me by fans of our show. I didn’t go looking for that bumper sticker, but once it found me I was all over it. So now, when people ask me what I’m a...
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“Relentlessly living amazing.”
Everyone’s got their own ideas on this, right? But to me it means finding that spot where your passion and talent and interests all meet, where you’re able to find a way to sustain yourself while doing the things you love. Look at where all those points connect. That’s where you need to be.”
YOUR HOMEWORK. For an athlete, the homework comes in the foundation. It comes in the countless hours of practice, the buckets of sweat and effort, the endless study of the rest of the field. Starting out, this was Rob’s focus, but when his supporting business interests kicked in, he was all about the research and development. He learned the ins and outs of the entertainment industry so he could speak the language when he went to meetings, so he could spot a hole
pitched Scholly as a product designed to help students and families deal with the high cost of higher education, and the Sharks were all over it. We’d heard hundreds of pitches by this point, but this kid was right up there with the best of them:
Doing all that extra legwork—looking under every rock for every possible scholarship opportunity—is what eventually made Scholly not just the first app to match students with scholarships, but one of the best pitches we’ve seen on Shark Tank, hands down.
with all the risk, and all the headaches. Now, if you hang in there, if you let the business grow organically and take you where it needs to go, you’ll be in a better position.
Did you know that 60 percent of professional basketball players are broke or bankrupt within five years of retirement? That number comes from the National Basketball Players Association. And it’s even worse for former professional football players: 78 percent of NFL players are in some type of financial distress within two years after leaving the game.
About 70 percent of all lottery winners end up broke or bankrupt. • In a recent study of lottery winners, only 55 percent reported that they were happier after winning all that money. • Twice as many lottery winners claiming prizes of up to $150,000 went bankrupt as did individuals in the general population.
Well, there’s a concept in business school–type discussions these days that suggests some start-ups are better off launching in a ground-up way. Social economists call this concept bootstrapping, but let’s go the term one better: to give yourself a meaningful shot at meaningful success, colossal bootstrapping is the way to go.
investors. He started out in a ground-up sort of way, testing his proof of concept among a few friends at Harvard and then growing from there.
But here’s the great lesson of Facebook: each step along the way, Zuckerberg grew
his business incrementally. He figured out what worked, what didn’t work, and what could work better.
Proof of concept is the only way to know if you’re truly on to something, and yet you’d be amazed how many entrepreneurs skip over this all-important
