Time, Relationships & Failure; Steve Sims

Welcome. Good evening, afternoon, wherever you are consuming this or whatever time or place in the planet, the first thing I’m going to ask you is to be safe and hug those around you. We are in strange times at the moment. We want to make sure we pay attention to those closest to us. If we can’t help those far away, we can have them in our thoughts, but we can certainly hug those close to us. So please do that. Take a moment to do that today.

All right. So I was actually at an event a little while ago, and someone was talking to me about affluent people, how they thought, what they got up to. And it reminded me of where I came from and what I got up to and how I actually reached out to affluent people. Now you probably heard from a prior podcast I did on the questions that I asked, how I asked them, first of all, “Why are you so rich, and I’m not?” How I tweaked that to, “Well, how come you are wealthy, and I’m not?” Until finally landed on the real clincher, “How come you are successful?” Which really taught me a lot about mindset.

I was very fortunate to be able to communicate with so many rich, powerful people all over the planet, and to be able to get all that information, and sponge it in, saturate it into my being so that I could then use it, emulate it, repeat them, and quite simply become a little miniature version of their mindset. As I grew and this went on and I got to be able to be very comfortable hanging out with some of those powerful people, I started to watch. Now a lot of the time I spent my early years in these relationships being a quizzical little five year old, staying curious and I noticed successful people, powerful, wealthy people. They’re curious. They want to know how to do something better, how to do it cheaper, how to do it more I impactfully, but they’re curious. And I noticed that, but then I started noticing a lot more. And as I grew and started having that as my vision, I wanted to really look in to see, well, okay, these people are very successful, but what are the common traits?

I’ve learned about the mindset, I’ve got that kind of information, but what are they habituating that each one of them is almost identically the same. And I had an event, a speakeasy in Arizona, and I actually told people this. I’ve told a few did for events, these three things that I discovered that make hugely successful people successful. Now you get them.

The first thing I noticed about all powerful, successful people is the way they look at time. They value time differently to other people and how I used to as well. They don’t care what you watch on Netflix. They don’t care what you had for dinner last night. They care what impact you are creating with the time you are given. They know full well, they can make millions. And in some cases, billions, but they can’t make more time. So they value time differently. “How can I create more impact in the hour I’ve got? Okay, I’ve got half a day off. What can I do with that?” Even if it’s by intention to do nothing, to regenerate and to just regroup, it’s by intention. They look at that time and they go, “Okay, I’m not going to waste it.” And when you talk to people like that, it’s almost like being grilled. They’re like, “What are you working on? How is that going to work? Why you? What impact are you trying to generate?” They really come at you.

I’ve left some of those meetings gasping for breath going, “Oh, my God. I expected a spotlight and maybe some electrodes attached to me bits.” It’s quite intense, but that’s how they view time. That’s the first thing I want you to focus on. How would you be different if you valued this as your last moment? The time you have, what would you do with it differently if you knew, and you should, it ain’t going to continue forever. There’s going to become a day when you don’t wake up. These people now, at that age and regardless of the age, but at that position, they focus on the time to create the impact. So number one is they value time differently to non-successful people and they create impact with every minute that they are given.

Number two, relationships. How many times have you heard people going, or you’ve seen on the movies going, “Oh yeah, that’s great. Let’s do lunch. Let’s meet on the golf course. Let’s grab a drink and we’ll talk about it.” And they take the conversation out of the office. Now I remember as a young lad think, “Oh, that’s what rich people do, let’s do lunch.” That kind of bullocks, but no, it wasn’t that way at all. They wanted to get to know the person outside of that environment. They wanted to see if they could connect with the actual person. But see, here’s the daft thing. And Cameron Howell talks about this a lot. You can teach people skills, you can’t teach them culture and belief. If you’ve got someone where both of your goals are aligned, you both want this to happen, you’re both striving for the same magical golden goose egg, but that person doesn’t have the skillset. Doesn’t matter. You can train them.

You can teach them how to type better. You can teach them how to do engineering. You can teach them anything, but you can’t teach culture. As long as you are both aligned, you can both conquer. If you both have different feelings and vibes and goalposts, you are running in different directions. So successful people look at people as relationships and they retain and join and affiliate and partner on culture and belief. So number two, quite simply is they view relationships different. They look at a true relationship, not a resume. That stuff you can be taught, but they value relationships differently to non-successful people, which brings us tidily to the third. And I’m going to give you a little story on this.

Ages ago, Elon Musk worked out that one of the most expensive things of rockets was the fuel cells. And he came up with the childish concept, “Well, if I can get those back, I’ll save a lot of money. Refuel and whack them on and up they go again.” Now this is very primitive thinking, but this is how successful people think, they childlike everything. What is the simple answer to a complicated problem? And that’s usually the best one. Now, all of the, well, how do I get them down? How do I refuel them? How do I make sure they’re safe? Those are just coincidentals, those are just little technicalities that they need to get over, but that’s what all the engineers are there for. So, do you remember when he came up with this concept and the fuel cells would fall off of the rocket, as it departed gravitational pull? They would fall through the air and then they would land on a floating pad out in the ocean.

Now that in itself is pretty damn good. Anyone that’s played any kind of like throwing the little bags through the holes in the board knows full well they’re just trying to get something to land somewhere. You try and score a hole in one on a dart board. This is a rocket landing on a floating pad. Now, do you remember in the early stages, it would tipple, fall over and explode like a Hollywood movie? We all saw it. We don’t see it now. Why? Because it doesn’t fall over anymore. It works. It’s not so much fun. But in the old days it was like, “Oh, there’s a hundred million dollars just blowing up in smoke. What must Elon be thinking?” Well, I’m going to tell you. You see, as that thing came down, I remember a lot of people stood at the back of the HQ center, watching all of the screens and oh, bated breath, it’s coming down. And Elon and all of his boys are looking into the computer screens. And then what happens?

It lands, starts to teeter. It rocks over. Bang, explodes. Everyone in the back of the room lent back, put their hand over their mouth and they gasped, “Oh my God.” Not in the room though. I remember Elon Musk grabs hold of the desk and leans into the data. What went wrong? It detached itself from the rocket perfectly. It made it onto the floating pad. It could have landed anywhere else in the planet, but no, it landed on that floating pad perfectly. But then it couldn’t correct its stability and it fell over. So where was the problem? The stability. While everyone in the back was holding their heads going, “Oh my God, this is terrible. Catastrophic.” He lent into the problem. Successful people lean into a problem to see where the nugget is, to see where the education is.

When things go wrong, it’s not a failure, it’s an education. That education becomes experience. Experience becomes credibility and credibility is what you can invoice for. So number three, hugely successful people lean into the problem, lean into the issue, lean into the “failure”, to see where the education is.

Now, there were loads of other little bits and loads of other traits that I noticed, but it was those three things, every single time. They value time differently. They value relationships differently and they lean into failure. Just imagine what you can do if you start emulating those people. If you start focusing on the impact you can create in time, the relationships have shared beliefs and culture within yours. And if you lean into a problem, rather than running away and gasping and throwing a pity party. Imitate great people to become great. I urge you to try those three things. It wasn’t just a one hit, it was constant. These things kept on coming up and they can work for you. The easiest way for us to get great is to emulate other people or to hang around in great rooms. When you’re in a great room, great things happen. I’ve already said that.

So hopefully I’ll see you one of my speakeasy’s, but for now think of those three things, time, relationships, and how to look into failure. This is Steve Sims. Have a great day and do something incredible with it. You never know if it’s your last.