This video provides a deeply personal narrative of overcoming fear in the pursuit of entrepreneurship. The speaker shares the pivotal moment of leaving a comfortable yet unfulfilling corporate life, highlighting the internal conflict of following familial expectations versus charting one's own path. Through vivid recounting of emotional struggles and tough decisions, the video explores the immense pressure many feel about breaking away from established norms, especially when it comes to pursuing a business or unconventional dreams.

Viewers will gain insight into how fear can exaggerate perceived risks and create obstacles that seem insurmountable but, when faced head-on, reveal new opportunities and personal growth. The speaker stresses that courage isn’t the absence of fear but the resolve to act despite it, and that the hardest choices often result in the most profound transformations. Additionally, the video offers practical advice on starting a business, outlining key principles such as skill acquisition, leveraging assets for efficiency, and harnessing personal experience—whether pain, passion, or profession—to identify viable opportunities.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. aversive [əˈvɜːrsɪv] - (adjective) - Causing a strong dislike or avoidance; something unpleasant or repellent. - Synonyms: (unpleasant, distasteful, repugnant)

If you allow that fear to change your behavior in an aversive way, as in it not towards what you want.

2. denominated [diˈnɑːməˌneɪtɪd] - verb (past participle) - Designated or expressed in a specified unit of value, such as currency or measurement. - Synonyms: (designated, specified, classified)

But even exchanges that occur that just are not denominated in time still occur over time.

3. leverage [ˈlɛvərɪdʒ] or [ˈliːvərɪdʒ] - (noun / verb) - The use of something that gives help or advantage; in business, the use of various resources to amplify results, such as getting more from the same effort. - Synonyms: (advantage, influence, amplification)

And then leverage to get as much out of it as you possibly can.

4. deliverability [dɪˌlɪvərəˈbɪlɪti] - (noun) - The ability to deliver a product or service as promised to the customer; especially relevant in marketing or digital communication. - Synonyms: (fulfillment, execution, provision)

But from the deliverability perspective, I kind of talked about deliverability first.

5. fractionalized [ˈfrækʃəˌnaɪzd] - verb (past participle) - Divided something into smaller, manageable pieces or segments. - Synonyms: (divided, segmented, split up)

All of those jobs can be fractionalized.

6. discretionary [dɪˈskreʃəˌnɛri] - (adjective) - Available to be used at one's own judgment or choice; not obligatory. - Synonyms: (optional, voluntary, elective)

You'll have deep understanding because you're spending all of your discretionary time pursuing this passion.

7. obsession [əbˈsɛʃən] - (noun) - An idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person's mind; intense focus or passion for something. - Synonyms: (preoccupation, fixation, mania)

And what everyone wants to see is obsession.

8. chastised [ˈtʃæstaɪzd] - verb (past participle) - Rebuked or criticized severely. - Synonyms: (rebuked, scolded, reprimanded)

Just being all in obsessed with stuff has almost been like, bastard or like, you know, chastised.

9. detour [ˈdiːtʊr] - (noun) - A deviation from a direct course or usual procedure; an alternative or indirect route. - Synonyms: (diversion, deviation, divergence)

Maybe a detour or a different story that I have to tell later on in my career.

10. compelling [kəmˈpɛlɪŋ] - (adjective) - Evoking interest, attention, or admiration in a powerfully irresistible way; convincing or persuasive. - Synonyms: (persuasive, convincing, irresistible)

A demonstration or a model is always more compelling than anything else.

11. paramount [ˈpærəˌmaʊnt] - (adjective) - More important than anything else; supreme. - Synonyms: (supreme, principal, foremost)

Why does that matter? I think that deep knowledge of the prospect is paramount or very important for creating exceptional products.

my honest business advice to someone who wants to get rich

No one wants to say they're afraid because if you say you're afraid, then it means you're a coward. I'd rather be a failure than a coward. The first big felt like death decision was I was a consultant, 22ish years old. I had a paid for, you know, condo that I bought overlooking the city. And I remember thinking like, I really hope I don't wake up tomorrow. And what was difficult about that was that at that time was when my father was most proud of me because I was doing everything that was according to plan. You know, he could talk about like his son who graduated in three years from Vanderbilt, had the, had the good job. Like everything was, we're following the plan. It was upon realizing that my ultimate expression of living out his dream was me feeling like I didn't want to be alive. And I realized that one of our dreams had to die, either his or mine. To put this in perspective of, like how afraid of my father's judgment I was, I left the state and drove across the country halfway through before calling him to tell him that I was gone.

And so I bring this up because I don't try, I'm not trying to be dramatic here, but I'm saying that if you feel a lot of pressure, I get it. Like, I tried to leave the job that I was at to pursue just literally anything that wasn't that just I wanted to start a business at some point. I didn't know how I was going to do it. I just knew that what I was doing was not the path I wanted to be on. You know, our relationship struggled for, you know, years after that. And I also bring that up because sometimes there's this illusion that, like, you know, you get on the, on the Oscar stage or whatever it is, and you're like, hey, I just want to thank, you know, my mom, my dad, my friends for always supporting me. And I can't say that, and I wish I could. And you might not be able to say that either. And I also don't think that's a reason not to do it. And I think that when you ask the original question, what are the people from 0 to 1 really looking for? I read tons of business books at that time, but I couldn't use any of them because I was so afraid. And what's crazy is that, like, I think about it now in retrospect, and it's like, it's crazy how large the perceived monsters can appear. And Layla has this quote that I love, but it's fear is A mile wide, an inch deep. And so you look at it, it looks like this ocean. And then you take the first step and you realize you don't drown. It's like, oh, there's ground underneath of this, right? There's other people who are more on my path. And the friends you lose, you gain new friends. Right? And so that fear was the hardest decision that I've had to overcome in my entrepreneurial career. And I think of all the. Of all the split paths in my life, that was the one that if I had many timelines or many universes that existed, that was probably the one that is the most likely that I would not have parted from. So I think in like, 90% of universes that Alex Ramosi exists. I'm just a consultant somewhere. And so I would encourage you if you do feel that you're not going to die, like, you won't die, and you might just live.

No one wants to say they're afraid, because if you say you're afraid, then it means you're a coward. And I think that it only means you're a coward if you don't. If you allow that fear to change your behavior in an aversive way, as in it not towards what you want. And so, you know, the inverse of that. Many people have heard it. Courage is not acting without fear, but despite fear. And I think that when you act, when you allow fear to change your behavior the wrong way, that is when you can give yourself that title of coward. And I think that that is a title that I have feared my whole life. And that label is almost. I'm more afraid of that label than the label of failure. I'd rather be a failure than a coward.

There's a tweet that I love by Andrew Wilkinson, which is every entrepreneur ever. Colon. Here's the winning number for my lottery ticket. And so it's like every entrepreneur will say, here's the winning lottery ticket. But it's like that game already. That drawing already happened. Okay. Yeah. Right. And so, like, you can't cash that ticket in. It's already done. And so people say the word first principles. No one really knows what it means. I mean, some people do, but basically, there are foundational truths of business that exist, and the conditions of the environment will change. And so you have to apply those truths to whatever the current condition is. And so that's what I try and tease out with the books and the stuff that I put out in content. But at the end of the day, you have an input of time like zooming all the way out. If the goal, assuming that your goal is to make money, okay, like, and this is just a purely economic business goal, then you have time, which is the primary currency that you trade it and you make dollars over a period of time. And so I tend to reject the idea of like never, you know, never trade time for dollars or anything like that, because everyone trades time for dollars. It's just some of us are more efficient at it than others. But even exchanges that occur that just are not denominated in time still occur over time. And so you have this foundational unit of time which you're going to give in. What we're seeking is the highest return on that time.

And so there, you know, within a business context, there's kind of three levels of things that have to occur in a business. You have to, you know, attract attention, you have to convert attention, and you have to deliver something for that attention. And so which is you need supply and demand to have a business and then leverage to get as much out of it as you possibly can. And so when you're looking at the assets that you have, assets can also be skills, resources, what you have available to you. Now, if you have nothing, then all you have is your brain, your hands, and the time that you have that you can put towards learning something. Which is why I'm a big fan of skill acquisition as one of the primary things that you can do is educating yourself, and not formally educating, but informally or alternatively educating yourself on super tactical things. Once you get over the fear, then you start asking, okay, how do I let people know about my stuff and what do I let them know? Right? And so you have to have something to sell, which is the offer. And ideally you want the offer to have as much leverage as possible. Like, so if you sold software or you sold media, those are things that you can cut once, sell, sell a thousand times. If you have a conversion mechanism, it's like you can't have it be automated like a checkout page or some sort of video sales letter or something like that, where people just buy without a phone salesperson. If you add a phone salesperson, there's less leverage. Not to say this wrong, but you want to have the highest leverage opportun. And then from the deliverability perspective, I kind of talked about deliverability first. But from the advertising perspective, if you reach out to people one on one, that's lower leverage than being able to make one piece of content that a million people see. Right? And so over time you go from low leverage to high leverage, where you have the same inputs, but you just get significantly more for your output. And that fundamentally is like, if we're reasoning up from first principles, how do I get said differently? The question someone I think is really asking is how do I get the most for what I put in? And you have to reason within your current context of your skills and your resources and your assets in order to derive that solution for you.

Business ideas typically come from one of three P's. So it comes from a pain that you're currently experiencing, a past profession. So the thing that you just quit, or some of the jobs that you just quit, or passion. So something that you're inherently interested in that you spend your time doing anyways, some skill that you learned while you were in the workforce, which by the way, is one of the most proven ways of making money. Because the economy has already showed you that people are willing to exchange money for that, for that specific job. And so in the world of gig economies and solopreneurs, every business can be dismantled into just jobs being done and all of those jobs can be fractionalized. So anybody, like we look at any business, you've got sales, you've got, you've got marketing, you've got customer success, you've got, you've got customer support. If you want to differentiate that, you've got product, you've got design, you've got web pages. There's, you know, there's so many different components to a business, you just need to learn one of them. And then it's like, boom, you have a skill that you can trade for money that you don't have anybody else to report to. And then pain is usually, I think in some ways, sometimes one of the biggest drivers is like you had an eating allergy and you couldn't find pancakes that dealt with your specific eating allergy. And you bet that there's a decent amount of other people with that allergy that also like pancakes. And so then you make pancakes that are delicious and amazing that also cater to people with that food allergy. And then all of a sudden, like you have a business based on pain.

And why does that matter? I think that deep knowledge of the prospect is paramount or very important for creating exceptional products. And you can either do that by doing a ton and ton of research or by being the prosp. I met the guy who invested in Regal Cinemas, which is probably the biggest chain in the US and it was when it was there was a guy who just won theater and it became now obvious Covid has disrupted that business. But you know, for 20 years, whatever, they crushed. And he said it was so weird to say that, oh, cinemas are going to make a comeback because they'd kind of been on a downturn or something like that during the time that he was making the investment. And he said, the reason I decided to invest in it was because this guy knew everything about the business down to how much the cost of a kernel of popcorn was. And he just knew it so like the back of his hand that he was like, this guy can't fail. He just knows too much about this business to not have it work and soon investing in, you know, making a gazillion dollars. And so, but I think that that deep understanding and if you look at all of these, the passion things, you'll have deep understanding because you're spending all of your discretionary time pursuing this passion. The pain. You have a deep understanding of the, of the problem and the prospects going through it because you've experienced it probably for years now. The professional one I would say is a bit of a shortcut because if you're quitting the job because you don't like it and then you say, I'm now going to do this for myself, well, you're okay. I mean. Well, the one proven point about that is that Darwin is proven to work from an economic perspective. You will be able to make money doing that because you already have made money doing it. I was talking to, on one of the future episodes of Mosey Tank that's coming out, we have a guy who's, he loves Dungeons and Dragons. So he's an it, he's an IT guy and just loves Dungeons and Dragons. And he was like, I just want this to make enough money that I don't have to do it anymore. But it was so pure, you know what I mean? And so I was like, we're going to help you do this. And so we kind of walked through the business plan for it. But like, is he going to be a billionaire? No, but I also don't think that's his goal. And so I think being really clear on what you want is important. So if you're like, I want to be the richest person in the world, I think it's a terrible goal. But if you want that, great. Well, you have to have a multi trillion dollar idea because now, because by the time that occurs, there's already multi trillion dollar companies now. So you've got to be looking at like deca trillion dollar opportunity. And so believe it or not, basically the bigger the goal, the narrower the scope of the paths to get there. If you're like, I want to make $10 million, I'm like, you can literally do that in almost any business. You want to make $100 million probably still almost any business, you can do it on a long enough time horizon. You can do it a trillion or decatrillion. It's going to be some sort of tech, it's probably going to have some sort of AI. And so you get basically, the bigger the goal is, the narrower the scope of how to get there. But the vast majority of people are like, I want to be the richest man in the world. It's just because they don't know how to really think through it and be like, all right, well, after like 100, there's really nothing you can't do except buy more big things. But like, in terms of your actual consumption, maybe even 20 is like, you can only eat at restaurants that go so expensive. You can only stay at the best hotels. You can only drive the nicest cars. You can do that with 25 million.

What's crazy is delay discounting happens both ways. Like, so like you set your alarm for 5am at night and you're like, I'm going to wake up at five. But that's because you're delaying the pain of waking up. And when it's immediate and I have to quit the job, like, I'll quit my job tomorrow for 20 years. And so it's just like we always, we, we, we delay the fact that we're going to be miserable into the present to like, like we massively discount what a whole lifetime of misery would be. It's, it can't reason the logic, chain of causation, causality of what's going in chain of events. And so when you get into the specific of it, all of a sudden you're like, okay, I'm not going to be homeless and then shamed and die. I might live in inferior living conditions for a short period. Which, by the way, when you're later on in your life, you'll look back and think of as the good old days, because I can't believe I was couch surfing. I was pursuing my dreams, right? It's only like in the moment that it feels bad when you look back. Like even I find this hilarious. Like, how long after you do something embarrassing is it funny, right? Like at some point for almost all of us, with enough time, the shameful experience becomes funny. And so if it is going to become funny, eventually it Might as well become funny now. Also, logic, downside, risk. Here I'll have a story, and I can always get my job back. Okay. And if I can't get that job back, I'll have other ones that will be available. Fine. And if I have a downgrading and some people think that I'm not as successful as them, okay. I'll not stop, though. Like, and you just kind of play it out and you're like, okay, I think I have, like, most of these conditions prepared for it. And then all of a sudd. You can, like, have those things if you want to be compelling. A demonstration or a model is always more compelling than anything else. And so me even going through that entire narrative, right, is taking everyone else who's been listening to this on some journey. It's like, if you want to make a compelling pitch for business, it's like, you pretty much just kind of went through one. And so that's really what it comes down to is you're like, well, what do I do with my business? It's like, create your narrative of why you're even doing this. And if you can explain to somebody why. Why they should care about this problem, or more specifically, why you care about this problem, I'll tell you this. More investors will like, I might be like, I don't care about kitchen utensils, but this girl certainly does. And I'm sure there's other women who do too. And what everyone wants to see is obsession. And unfortunately, in, like, some of the world, I know more in the UK than the US now, like, that kind of perspective of, like, just being all in obsessed with stuff has almost been like, bastard or like, you know, chastised. And I. But the people who are obsessed are the ones who change the world, at least change their world. And so a lot of times we don't. We don't look at what I call the don't, which is like the. The alternate path. And so if I had played out my existing path, I had a guarantee of outcome I didn't want, it was just out of delay, whereas here there's a chance that I can make it. And so one of the final kind of frameworks for making the decision was guarantee bad, chance at good. And I was like, well, I might as well take a chance. And I strongly encourage thinking about playing it out.

And so what I mean by that is, like, I think fear exists in the vague, not in the specific. And so when you say, I'm going to quit my job, and then what if this doesn't work, I'm going to failure. Tons of fear if I say I'm going to quit my job and then I'm going to try and start a business. And if the business doesn't work, I'll probably have a compelling story that I could tell for business school if I wanted to to show that I had some entrepreneurial slant in the meantime, I could use that experience plus my job experience to probably get another or maybe even better job in the meantime and match or supersede my existing income in actual loss would be maybe the savings that I had saved up. But if I'm younger or I haven't made as much money as I want, then that's never been the amount of money that would be material anyways on the grand scheme of what I would like to make and in terms of living situation, I will worst case go back to my parents house with my tail between my legs or sleep at a friend's couch because I have enough people that would be willing to put me up in a garage if I had to. And so it's like, okay, so my actual worst case scenario is just like I have a cool story and maybe some shame that is self inflicted because it's not like no one else cares really, but it's self inflicted shame and maybe a detour or a different story that I have to tell later on in my career. Not as much fear there, right? But like the first one, like I'll fail, everyone will hate me and I'll die. Basically anybody who's listening. The harder it is for you to break free of whatever kind of mental prison you've made for yourself, whether that's real or just in your head, the more compelling your story will be when you break through it. Sam.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP, INSPIRATION, LEADERSHIP, FEAR, CAREER CHANGE, PERSONAL GROWTH, BUSINESS MOTIVERSITY