010: The Straightest Road to Success

You know, to be great, I think you have to fight. And I very much think that my success is a product of some level of skill. But I do think I win because I outwork people.

I really do believe that. I do believe that 100%. And I'm not sure that if my dad didn't set that example, that I'd even have the ability to think one could work that hard.

The fact that I've been working 19 hours a day every day for the last 20 years is easy for me. It's the only gear I knew, right? I was poor, I sucked shit at school, it was the only gear I had.

You know I think we need to recognize that your biggest advantage is that you're hungrier than your competitor and that if you're not applying your one advantage which is your work ethic and the hours that you have to put into your business, well then you're going to come up short.

I sit here with enormous assumptions around all of you that you're just too soft to beat me, right, that I think you've had it better and that that alone doesn't allow you to beat me. Somebody will come with the counter cultural point of view, and they're like, “Gary, that's cool.

But I don't have to work that hard because I'm working smarter.” “Yeah, me too, asshole, I work hard and smart, now what?” Look there's a 12-hour, 10-hour, 8-hour, 15-hour workday.

You can finish a lot of things in those 18, 12, 9 hours or you can finish medium amounts of things or lightweight things. People focus on too many small details.

Way too many in this room are going to spend the next 30, 40 years of their lives trying to check the boxes of the things that they're not as good at, and that you're going to waste a fuck load of time and lose.

I highly recommend for all you hustlers, because there's a lot of you, there's a lot of you that are always talking about, “Gary, I do work hard.” And you do.

1You work for 16 hours. Some people just don't have the attention span or the capacity to remember. They're like “There's a lot of things I can't learn.”

I was a very poor student because the subject matter bored me. And if I was forced to become great on understanding the great artists of the 20th century, I'm in big trouble. And so I would tell people to bet on their strengths.

You need to bet on your strengths and don't give a fuck about what you suck at, and to put themselves in a position to win with their strengths because that is absolutely the straightest line to success.

Greatness comes from adversity and looking the challenge in the eye, and having the intestinal fortitude to kind of to step up and go after it.