Future Proofing You

Jay Samit talks about the Twelve Truths he’s written about in his book and how he busts through a lot of myths. One is that the world operates as a zero-sum game that if I win, you lose. He said, “That’s not the truth. What is true is that you’re only one click away from having incredible success.” He defines success as going way beyond making money but realizing what your purpose is. When you’re willing to work harder than most people, he says, you have a life that’s better than most people. We talk about the different kinds of fear. The fear of humiliation, failure, rejection, and how to overcome those fears.

Why don’t you fill us in on what you saw and the success of Disrupt You! Let’s take a minute and brag about that huge success. How many languages has it been translated to and the impact that you saw?

I highly recommend it to anybody who feels that they have a book in them to write it. You’ve learned this as well because I’ve run companies with 300,000 employees and offices all over the world. When you’re at the top of a big company, all that you get is problems, fires, and hate mail. When you write a book that changes people’s lives, you get literally love letters from around the world. People who’ve turned their lives around or people that have stopped a suicide people. It’s an amazing transformation. The response was beyond anything I ever imagined. I’ve heard from readers in 140 countries. With COVID disrupting the world, it’s become a hit again and it’s coming out in languages like Icelandic, Urdu, Italian, Polish, and on and on.

Each time when it launches in the country, I suddenly hear from people whose lives are transformed. That being said, it turns out I have thin skin. Once in a while, I get an email from somebody, usually a millennial that said, “This is all motivational, but I could never do this.” That drove me nuts because my whole reason for writing a book isn’t to make any money, I don’t need it. The purpose is to take what I’ve learned and what I feel you’re not learning in school, and you’re not learning in an MBA program of how to get success and it’s easy.

I grew up in a regular middle-class, working-class family and dozens of friends become billionaires and change the world. We’re not smarter, we’re not better looking, we didn’t have connections, we didn’t have capital, but we saw the world differently and that can be taught. I decided to put my reputation on the line and I took a young man who was an immigrant, grew up on welfare, had no connections, no capital, and no entrepreneurs in their family. I decided to take the knowledge that I have and synthesize it down to twelve truths that if you embrace these, you will be successful.

His name is Vin Clancy and I mentored him one day a week for a year. I gave him no money. I introduced him to no one and I didn’t tell him what business to start. By the end of the first month, he made $70,000 and he could have flown to Europe without a plane. He didn’t believe it was possible. I didn’t know if he could keep up that level of commitment. No one says it’s easy but if you’re willing to work one year of your life harder than most people will, you can live the rest of your life better than most people will. He made that sacrifice and spoiler alert for the book, he hit it in less than a year, which was amazing to me. People wanted it to step by step. I went with Wiley as a publisher this time because they’re known more for technical types of books but it’s not a technical book. It’s some basic tricks. I’ll give you an obvious one and you know them. You solved it.

I’ve seen them in action before the transformation. I’ve heard his own personal story. You certainly picked a rags to riches storytelling genre there to come to life.

I’m also a fan of My Fair Lady and the Cockney accent from England so he’s my Pygmalion. Let’s start with a basic premise that people are taught in school that’s wrong. In school, you’re taught to buy an apple for $1 and you sell it for $2. You make $1 but the world is a zero-sum game. The only way for me to make money is to take it from you. When in fact, most of the millionaires and many of the billionaires never made a profit. They didn’t take money. If I start a new company, and I sell you 10% for $1,000, we now have a $10,000 company. I made $9,000 out of thin air. Jeff Bezos lost money for a decade and became the wealthiest man on the planet.

Every 48 hours, there’s the self-made billionaire. What are these people doing differently? Why is it easy when we’re all one click away? I have to be right for a nanosecond. To make money or to change the world and success isn’t about making money. I believe that the purpose of life is to live a life of purpose. What is your purpose and what do you want to achieve? One of the things that I’ve definitely seen since traveling the world for the past few years on endless book tours is that capitalism has to change and is changing to sustainable capitalism. Things that are both good for the bottom line and good for the planet.

This isn’t some hippie-dippy left-wing philosophy. Walmart, one of the biggest retailers in the world realized that their second biggest cost after employees was electricity so now they’re the biggest solar user. Why? It’s because it’s good for the bottom line and it’s good for the planet. There are many opportunities now to leverage the networks and the technology to do things in ways that don’t end life on this planet but help us sustain life. If you look at all these changes, and you realize with each of these changes, what they are new opportunities. There are many new ways to make money that didn’t exist.

That’s what I love about this book, Future Proofing You. It’s almost a continuation of Disrupt You! which you did brilliantly in laying out the premise that you need to disrupt yourself before it happens to you. Many people are afraid of being disrupted in terms of their job ending or getting fired and now the concept of the pandemic, having many people and industries even going away. The need to future proof ourselves is even more valuable than ever so we’re not living in fear. This concept of, “I’m doing my job. It’s a means to an end. I’m not happy, and it could go away at any moment.” That’s not a definition of anybody’s success, is it?

Yeah. To work at a job that you hate, wake up one day and you didn’t trade a day or a week or a year, you traded the only life you’ll ever have. This makes no sense to me. I was a vice-chairman of a company with 300,000 employees and partners retiring at 60. It’s a consulting firm. Since they run their own retirement plans and all that, they know the life expectancy. Here are the wealthiest and most successful leaders in the world. Their average life ends at 66.

Isn’t that shocking?

Your average NFL players’ life ends at 55. We’re not making choices that make sense and for those that didn’t believe the disruption would happen to them, 2020 proved my premise. Whether by choice or circumstance, you will be disrupted. That’s one of the things when we’re talking about sustainable capitalism. Whether you believe it or not, governments are going to start coming up with regulations that are going to force the industry to do things for survival.

Do you wait until your business gets told to do something and you’re out of business or do you get ahead of the curve? Do you look at the opportunities that are happening with this change? You mentioned this as a second course. In Future Proofing You, I talked about if this was a college course, the prerequisite would have been to take Disrupt You! 101. This is a continuation. This fills in, for me, the gaps of what people said that I didn’t cover and they didn’t understand how capital is created. Fear is one of the truths that we talked about.

Let’s talk a little about that.

Fear is the greatest thing.

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