Starting from Nothing The Foundation Podcast Introduction: Welcome to Starting from Nothing The Foundation Podcast, the place where incredible entrepreneur show you how they built their businesses entirely from scratch before they knew what the heck they were doing. Dane: In this episode of Starting from Nothing, we look at the employee versus the entrepreneurial mind. Welcome to another solo podcast with your host, Dane Maxwell. A happy Wednesday to you all. A lot is stirring inside of me as I start the day today. As I get to spend time with you today wherever you're at, wherever you're listening to this, whether it s working out, taking a walk, in your car can t think of any other places than that maybe on the beach. I want to talk to you about the employee versus the entrepreneurial mind. As I was sitting down to begin this podcast today, I felt starting with panic, I felt a little anxiety, then it morphed into fear, then it moved into a slight sting in my heart, then grief, then it moved into love. At that point, I started with my commitment of making entrepreneurship possible. When I began and shifted into my commitment, honored my feelings first. Let my feelings move however they needed to move without trying to change them, just watching them, just observing them, and then going into my commitment immediately after. That is how I began this podcast today. Before we get into the discussion on the employee versus the entrepreneurial mind, I d like to invite you to contribute. I d like you to challenge what I'm about to say. If you think I'm missing something or you disagree with one of these opinions or you highly agree, I want to know. Please post in the comments on our podcast page here which you can go to at thefoundation.com and click on the podcast link and you ll find this episode on the employee versus entrepreneurial mind. For those of you interested, how do you make the jump? How do you make the leap? Or is it maybe a more gradual progression from the employee mind to the entrepreneurial mind. I want to start by giving a little illustration. I ve been inspired to make a little comic illustration for years but yet haven t ever brought up to fruition. I'm just going to paint the picture of the employee versus the entrepreneurial mind. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do it by talking about the poor, the middle class, the upper class, or the
millionaires, and then the billionaires. The poor, middle, million, and billionaire class. If you are sitting on a street corner or if you're looking at this and you're at a street corner, and you were in the poor category. I mean poor in terms of financial. I don t mean in terms of sense of value as a human which is infinite no matter where your mind is. I m just talking about the mindset and the perspective of someone who s poor financially. They may be rich in many other areas. I am speaking of poor financially. If you're poor financially and you're looking at a street corner, you might look at the street corner. If there was a Mercedes Benz on that street corner, you would see that as unobtainable to own. If there was a building with a restaurant in there, you might think that it s really hard to go in there and eat, and you might just think about how you have to go to the grocery store. If there was a woman walking by in a nice Versace Does Versace make shoes? One of the really high end shoemakers, they have the red underside; those really high end shoes that have the red underside. Then a nice bag like a Dolce and Gabbana bag or something. If you saw that, you would just see it as unobtainable as well. If the same person but now you shift to a middle class mindset, now if you see that Mercedes Benz, you're not going to see that as unobtainable. You're going to think about what s the monthly payment on that Mercedes Benz. So you're going to see a Mercedes Benz, you're going to see what, $599 a month over top that thing. The poor guy, he sees the Mercedes as unobtainable. He can never afford it. The middle class is going to see, Oh, what s the monthly payment on that? $599 a month. He s going to wonder that. Then if the middle class guy sees the restaurant he may think, Do I like that restaurant? Do I not? Am I hungry? Am I not? Then if he sees the woman in the Dolce and Gabbana bag, maybe he thinks that Oh, I could put that on a credit card or maybe I won t. It depends on the mind of the particular middle class. That s to be debated depending on the middle class how they would see that. Most definitely the restaurant, and most definitely the monthly payment, that s how you could identify if you re currently in the middle class mindset. If you're the millionaire mindset, if you look at that corner and you see that Mercedes Benz, you are going to see not $599 a month but you re going to see a depreciating asset and you're probably going to see cashes burning out of your bank account as you look at that car. If you like Mercedes, then you're not going to see the $599 monthly payment, you're going to see the total purchase price of that car and how much you're immediately going to depreciate It s going to depreciate in
value, how much money you're going to lose and you're still going to get it but you're most definitely not going to be thinking in terms of that car as a monthly payment. When you look at that restaurant behind you as a millionaire, you're going to see not a restaurant but you're going to see a commercial real estate building. You're going to see monthly you're going to be wondering what s the monthly cash flow of that real estate building? You're going to wonder what the internal rate of return is on that, or the discounted cash flows, or any of the things that most millionaires know. It s actually hard for me to meet too many millionaires that are completely ignorant to real estate. It tends to be a pretty common thing. I m familiar with it although I don t play in that realm. That s what the millionaire would see. They might not even see the Dolce and Gabbana and shoes person, they re so obsessed with Generally speaking, the millionaires I know are pretty modest. They don t typically buy those higher end things which is interesting. It depends on the millionaire, of course. If you ve read The Millionaire Next Door, or even the better book The Millionaire Mind which are phenomenal books, you ll see that most millionaires I can t remember. It s an astronomically high percentage of millionaires drive Buicks or something like that for example. I'm not saying they wouldn t get it, they would just see the car the way I saw it, and they would see the commercial real estate building and they wouldn t really see the restaurant per se. If they re hungry, they might, but that s not how the millionaire mind sees the world. If you move to the coveted billionaire mind, basically the billionaire would be thinking about how do I He would be financing the millionaire to buy that building. Billionaires wouldn t really He might look at the building. He would see internal rate of return, and cash flow, and all those commercial real estate terms. He would see the car and he would see it as a he probably wouldn t even care because he s got a billion dollars. The important thing about the billionaire is they finance the millionaire in this instance. So he s thinking of how he could finance that. The billionaire may not even have the money to finance. It s not about having the money to finance. A billionaire mind, you could go out and put together a financial pool of cash that you could then now loan out to investors. It is not about how much money you have in any of these instances, it s just your mind and how you view the world. That s the portrait of the four types of minds based on what class. That will segue us into the employee versus entrepreneur. Let me know if that was useful for you in the feedback.
Here is employee versus entrepreneur. Before I get into this, I just want to say that these are my opinions, my projections, my judgments, and from my personal experience. This is currently where I stand on the employee versus entrepreneur. I also want to say that I don t think that everyone is truly designed to be an entrepreneur. I think you know if you're designed to be an entrepreneur, if you can t stop thinking about it and you keep finding yourself absolutely miserable as an employee no matter where you go. It s a pretty good sign that entrepreneurship might be your path. It s not necessarily whether you're doing it yet or not, it just seems to be where you're oriented towards. We have a team of nine or ten on The Foundation now and they re all incredible. Some of them are more entrepreneurial minded. They may move on. They re just working with us to learn right now. Others just really enjoy working on a team. They don t want to hold the energetic space of a company. These are not like, Oh, employee. Let s look down on them. Oh, entrepreneurs. Wow, let s covet them. Or even the other way around. Entrepreneurs, let s look down on them, and Employees, let s covet them. It s neither, actually. It s just my perspective on the matter. The employee is generally told what to do. The employee is generally told, if not encouraged, when to wake up, when to attend meetings, when to go to lunch, when to go to vacation. The employees are just generally at the disposal of the company or the entrepreneur. Not disposal in terms of remove but in need if you will. I m just so hypersensitive to being careful here to not even use any words that may hint at the value of either of these in terms of the human based category. The employee is generally told what to do, the entrepreneur tells themselves what to do. This is why I see a lot of people struggle when they go from employee to entrepreneur. If you ve been an employee your whole life and you ve been told what to do and you move into entrepreneur where you re now telling yourself what to do, it can be a very, very terrifying, paralyzing experience. It takes some practice. It can take practice to get your mind moving [unclear 00:12:20]. You're going to tell yourself what to do instead of being told what to do. This is where a lot of self-sabotage comes up. This is where a lot of paralyzing fear and uncertainty can come up. This is why the emotional support that we provide in The Foundation is, I think, critical to people while they re on their journey because it takes a while for the mind to switch. I find that our students, they do remarkable things that were between year two and four. They come and join The Foundation, they re getting started in
six months depends on where you're at in your entrepreneurial mind but our students get started in about six months. But what happens is about within two to four years, our students are doing remarkable things, like really incredible things. It s not because of In my opinion, it s because of the shift of moving from being told what to do to telling yourself what to do and many other things, and also the emotional side of For some reason, I notice it just takes people s bodies. They re literally in their nervous system to adapt to the entrepreneurial way of life. Mechanically, starting a business is very simple. Mechanically, being an entrepreneur is very simple and straight forward very, very simple and straight forward. Once you process the emotions, the emotions are out of the way and you're actually in the embodiment of an entrepreneur, it s very mechanical. That process of moving from employee to entrepreneur is quite a journey, and I love supporting people through it. I find that six months is enough time to really get your nervous system switched over into the entrepreneurial world which is why we have a six-month program. And then I find our students while they do get started on their successful way in six months, they really start doing amazing things in two to four years. Anyway, employees generally follow a vision and entrepreneurs lead a vision. This is a pretty straight forward sentence. I can tell you, as an entrepreneur, it can be very tricky for me to find a vision sometimes. But I can tell you that when I'm following someone else s vision, I just don t feel alive inside. I just like to be my own vision and, you know, vision right now is making entrepreneurship possible (for as many people as possible). Then, as an employee, you have generally a muted emotional experience compared to the entrepreneur who has a more full emotional experience. This is a little debatable. What I'm talking about here is if you're waking up as an employee in the morning, you may have some fear on a scale of one to ten that you like, Oh man, could I lose my job today or something. It might be like a three, four, five. Maybe if you're incredibly activated, it could be up to a ten. The entrepreneur, on the other hand, in that same spectrum, they just feel things to a greater capacity. Most of the time I see, for employees, who are unhappy, their emotional spectrum is muted. They re not really either totally depressed or totally happy, they re just somewhere in between which is really a dangerous place to be because it s a muted experience. Whereas the entrepreneur, they feel the lowest lows of depression and the highest highs of happiness. The cup of your joy is carved by the sorrow of your grief. If you're not able to go to one extreme, it s unlikely that you're able to hit the other.
That s why entrepreneurship can be such a rich experience for me is I can go onto the depths of really deep depression or fear and I can come out a whole other side of elation, and joy, and happiness. This is important to know because when you move from employee to entrepreneur, what happens is if you get paralyzed as you're a starting entrepreneur, it can be absolutely truly paralyzing. It s not because being an entrepreneur is wrong for you, it s that you're just not used to the emotional experience of an entrepreneur which is absolutely a full spectrum scale. I ve heard of entrepreneurs who have launched failed products and then ended up committing suicide. That can be a terrible thing to hear. Launching a failed product as an entrepreneur can be truly, truly devastating. It s less devastating as an employee to launch a failed product. Emotionally, it doesn t hit you as hard as an entrepreneur, which thankfully we have processes in place in The Foundation so that launching a failed product is not impossible but very unlikely. The emotional support we provide entrepreneurs here so that they re never alone in the devastation of what could be launching a failed product. I'm not saying that always happens. I was just talking to my buddy, Amir Khella, the creator of Keynotopia, amazing guy, brilliant mind. He was just talking about how important it is to be emotionally supported as an entrepreneur because of that full spectrum. The next thing that I ve noticed with the employee versus entrepreneur is the employees tend to seek certainty. As an employee, certainty is It s just kind of an unconscious drive for the seek of certainty. Entrepreneurs, from what I know, they tend to sit in uncertainty. Entrepreneurs are also very, very, very creative at coming up with things so they can be certain enough. Generally speaking as an entrepreneur, what I ve noticed from others and myself as I sit in uncertainty, I ll go and sit in a massive like, I have no idea what to do. I m really confused. How are we going to do this? Oh man, this is going to be fun. Let s figure this out. Then I notice employees are like, Okay man, I just need to know what s going to happen. Just tell me what s going to happen. That s something to be aware of as you're making the shift from employee to entrepreneurial mind. The next is employees. They tend to exchange things for value. They might exchange time for value. They might exchange their skills for value. Entrepreneurs, they create value. It s just kind of an unconscious It becomes unconscious after a while that as an entrepreneur you just tend to go and create value wherever you go. Whether it s you creating a new product, creating a new service, creating a new offering, creating a new opportunity inside of an older opportunity.
There are employees that do, do this. This is a phenomenal skill to have no matter what if you decide to be employee or entrepreneur. Creating value is a great way to make yourself absolutely irreplaceable. That s what I ve noticed as employees, they re looking to exchange time or skills for value and entrepreneurs are looking to create value often times out of thin air. Employees tend to have a need for answers. They just want to know what the answers are. Entrepreneurs, they tend to sit in questions. What I ve learned about questions, and what I can tell you from a more spiritual perspective, is that questions have and this is from a book called The Presence Process, phenomenal book we re actually reading in a book club right now. In The Presence Process, they talk about every question has an energetic vibrational frequency and every question has a matching vibrational answer. If there s a frequency you have If you ask a question that has this energetic frequency, there is actually a matching energetic answer frequency out there. So any question that you can ask, there is an answer to. If you ask questions and then sit in the questions, then what I ve noticed is the answers will emerge not right away sometimes, sometimes longer, sometimes days, maybe sometimes even weeks or months. What I notice is that employee mind is like they ask a question, boom, they want an answer right away. An entrepreneur may sit, and that s because there s some anxiety or stress of like, Gosh, I just need this answer. Whereas the entrepreneur when they ask this question, what happens is the anxiety or stress maybe there for the entrepreneur but the entrepreneur values that because they sit in that space and then eventually a question will emerge, which they will then give to an employee to go and do. Like I said, these aren t hard and fast rules, of course. This is just my opinion. I d love to hear what you think, please comment below. If you think about this as the entrepreneur ask question and they sit in this anxiety and stress, answers emerge. I can give you examples like how do you price a product, for example. If I m building Paperless Pipeline, which is my most successful software product, paperlesspipeline.com. I think it s around $80,000 a month now. Fully, completely funds my lifestyle without me ever having to work. It s just a beautiful application. With that freedom, I work more than I ever have in my life on The Foundation because the freedom that I have which is complete and total freedom to go anywhere in the world and do just about anything that my mind can think of. My only limit to my freedom is my creativity in my mind. With all this freedom I have, nothing compares to the feeling that I have of
being obsessed with work. That s what I love, and I'm so happy that I get to work because I choose to. While you sit in a question, we re just thinking about how do you price Paperless Pipeline? The process takes a couple weeks whereas, I ve got to figure out the price, I ve got to figure out the price. I just sit in the question and it s kind of unnerving. If you pick a wrong price, you could really the price of your product dictates the revenue of your company. It s a big decision. I just sit in that question for a while, come up with a bunch of different pricings, keep thinking about it, keep feeling into it, and eventually the correct pricing emerges. I talk to customers about it and they respond favorably to the price. The customers that I talk to know that I'm making a profit on it and they're happy that I'm making a profit on it because it s solving their problem. That s when you get that great win, win, win. Employees are risk-averse and entrepreneurs are, yes, risk-averse as well in my experience. There are some entrepreneurs out there that I know that are just ridiculously risky. I think Richard Branson may qualify in that category just from stories I ve heard where mortgages his home once, twice, or three times to fund an idea. That s not my belief system to do something like that, but I also don t own my own island now, Necker Island. I wanted to just let you know that. I'm risk-averse, very risk-averse. The employees are also risk-averse. Entrepreneurs just have the right mind to create structure, and systems, and procedures and put all those in place to really mitigate the risk. My belief system is that being an employee is much riskier than being an entrepreneur. I d rather be an entrepreneur any day of the week than an employee just because of the I would feel terrified as an employee. I have one stream of income, one source of income, anything could happen and I'm not in control if I have my job or not. Whereas as an entrepreneur, I have complete control over my income, complete control over if I have a job, and money is always flowing even in depressions, even in recessions, even in booms. Money is always flowing and changing hands. In depressions or recessions For example on real estate in depressions and recessions, money is always moving just about as fast. In this case it s just moving in the foreclosed and depressed homes area. Money s always moving. It s not about I guess what I'm just trying to get at is it s much easier to make money as an entrepreneur than you might think because money is always, always moving. As an employee, fear is paralyzing and as an entrepreneur, fear is moving. I notice that entrepreneurs, they kind of charge towards fear. The employees
tend to freeze in fear. There are some employees that can charge towards fear. I don't know many but I'm sure there are a few that exist. Whereas the entrepreneur that I know in their fear, they just charge at it. At least, it s my personal experience. For me, this is what happens for me, and this is what I ve seen, give or take, in the world. The next is the employee mind can be limited in how it thinks and what it thinks is possible because they are working under the constraints of an entrepreneur. If the entrepreneur is not training the employee correctly, the limited mind in the employee This actually isn t when I wrote this down, it wasn t I actually write down notes for about ten or 15 minutes before I get on these solo podcasts. When I wrote down limited, I actually meant more they re limited in the time and limited in the money they can make. Because they exchange skills or time for money, they re both limited in the impact they can make and the money they can make whereas the entrepreneur is very unlimited in both impact and money they can make. Then, what I notice about employees who want to be entrepreneurs but aren t employees who want to be entrepreneurs, they tend to be conditional. They re like, Oh, if I get an idea, I ll start a business. Oh, if I get this, I ll start a business. Oh, if this happens, X, Y, Z happens, I ll start a business. Oh, if I only had a few more hours in the day, I d start a business. They have conditions about being an entrepreneur. Whereas the entrepreneurs I know, they are unconditional about being an entrepreneur. This is interesting. They re not like, Oh, okay. Well, if I get that good idea, if I get the money, if I get the time, then I can be an entrepreneur. They re just like, No, dude, there s no matter what, I will be an entrepreneur. When you get to that unconditional space by having that commitment to yourself like we talked about the last podcast on commitment, last Wednesday podcast on commitment, that s when some interesting things happen. Employees are not as lonely unless they are entrepreneurs stuck in an employee position. Entrepreneurs are generally more lonely. Entrepreneurship is brutal. As an employee, it s not as brutal. I mean brutal on your emotions, brutal on getting rejected by a customer, a customer complaining about your product, getting a refund, having one of your ideas fail, or not be accepted. By fail I mean the market s not responding to it, it s a brutal experience, whereas an employee it s not quite as brutal. That sums up what I have noted down for employee versus entrepreneurial mind. I d love to hear what you think. Please come to the podcast page, post in the comments, I ll be reading all of them. Let me know if there are any additional ones you d like to make, any disagreements you have, anything that you have agreed to, anything that really resonated with you or stuck with you.
If you want more information on any of this stuff, just let me know as well because I ll be filming, recording future podcast episodes. That covers today. And would love to meet you. If you come over to The Foundation and post a comment on this podcast, you go to thefoundation.com, go to podcast, and you can find Employee Versus Entrepreneurial Mind. More importantly, if you d like to be in the more entrepreneurial realm, if you d like to live in this place where there s this voice inside that says you need to be here, you need to be at The Foundation, you need to be in the entrepreneurial world, you need to be around people who believe in you, you need to be doing your own thing, you want to build something you're proud of, you want to make the world a better place, and you d like to finance your lifestyle while you do it, we d love to have you in The Foundation. We d love to get the chance to personally watch and mentor you, and have you grow along the way. You can do so at thefoundation.com/family. Closing: Thank you for joining us. We ve taken this interview and created a custom action guide so you know exactly what action steps to take to grow your business. Just head over to thefoundationpodcast.com to download it for free. Thanks for listening and we ll see you next week.