I get so many questions from all of you guys in my DMs in the comment section on YouTube, everywhere. So I want to try something new. I'm going to start answering some of those questions that I've historically answered privately in public. So more of you can gain access to those answers.
I asked everybody in my Telegram community to submit videos of questions that they want answered from me. And in this video today, I'm going to answer those questions with total, total honesty. And these questions range across business to personal questions, to questions about relationships and mental health and challenges that you're facing. So here is the first question you ask me this week.
My name's Daniela, I'm 18 and I'm about to enter my first year at uni to study economics. I have a lot of commitments. I'm running a business with my business partner. I'm making music, I'm learning languages and I'm playing sports.
And I worry that my focus is split. How do you suggest I move forward? Do you think I should grip my teeth and balance everything to the best of my ability? Or do you think I should prioritize and sacrifice for better quality output, despite loving every single thing?
I'm looking forward to your response. Thank you so much for listening. I think the single biggest lesson I learned when I was starting off early in my business career was the importance of focus. And I had this run into by one of my investors one day when I came to them and presented this new idea, which was in addition to the current company that I was building.
And they hit me really hard with this like verbal whip and told me, they said, Steve, focus is everything. And that stayed with me. I was annoyed at the time because naturally when you're a creative person and a very inspired person, as many of us are, you have so many ideas. And the problem is you can't take on all those ideas at once.
And any attempt to do so compromises each individual idea. So if you have three ideas and you're giving them 33% of your time each, the chance of mastery or success in any of those things is drastically, drastically reduced. And especially when it comes to business, if you're giving anything less than 100% of your focus to your business, you can rest assured that there are very competent, probably better funded competitors out there that are giving 100%. Focus and your time is the only currency that you have.
So making the decision to invest only a part of your time in focus into what you're doing is the decision to reduce the chance of a really successful outcome. And here's another thing. So I don't know how solid this is as advice, but honestly, when you're young and you're broke and you're bootstrapping, focus matters even more. So for me, what I would do, and I think about the 50 years of my career, is at the very, very start, I'd go very, very, very narrow.
And I'd try and succeed in something that would be the gateway, if it is successful, to me being able to build my resources, my financial resources, my team, so that I can focus on multiple things. And that's really the trajectory I've taken in my life. I, at 18 years old, focused on one thing, one business idea and really nothing else. And when I say nothing else, I also mean a lot of personal things were sacrificed.
I focused on that for about seven years in total. That business became a success. I now have resources to allocate against multiple things that I want to do, and your power to focus. In business, what we do is we operate in sprints, which means when you have an idea, you assemble a team around it and you focus them for a dedicated and predetermined period of time, say three months or six months, only on that idea to give it its best possible chance of success.
And after those six months, you assess it, and you make very brutal, very honest, very ego-free decisions, whether to continue or not. That's how I like to think about focus and projects and how to make the decisions around allocating your time. What you really should do, if you want to give an idea its best possible chance of success, if you want to give DJing your best possible chance of success, or writing that book, or becoming a content creator, is you should look at the task and dedicate the next six months to doing that and only that. If you allocate time to other things in that period, you're reducing the chance of a positive outcome for that one thing.
And I tend to see as well, especially young entrepreneurs, when they have multiple businesses and multiple things they're pursuing and multiple things they're trying to master at the same time, as the phrase goes, they become the master of none, which means they kind of stumble through life, never re-achieving any real substantive success, because they've spent all of their life trying things in a half-assed, timid way. If you want to be successful, if you want to get mastery in anything that matters to you, here's where discipline really matters. You have to install into your mind something I call the Sunday shelf, which is inspiration comes to you. You have a new idea when you're walking down the street or in the shower, you think that's brilliant, that will be a multi-gazillion dollar idea, we will do it.
If you want to be successful, don't then add it into your successful idea, don't then try and contend with two different ideas and give 50% to each. Put it on the Sunday shelf and see if it nags you. The great ideas will sit there on that Sunday shelf and they will nag you. And if it nags you for long enough, six months, for a year, then maybe it's time to take action.
But my mind has a Sunday shelf on it that has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things on it. And if something sits there for more than a year, more than six months, and it's still screaming at me, and it doesn't dissolve away and collect dust on the Sunday shelf and disappear into the back, then I pull it forward and I plan in place to give it the sprint it deserves to resource that idea and give it its best possible chance of success. Hi, Stephen. My name's Chloe.
And my question to you is, what do you believe to be the most important character trait that a person has to possess in order to achieve a hugely successful business? I would love to know. In terms of character traits to build really successful businesses, I kind of think of it in stages and I think of it in stages of a business's life. The question here is about the character traits.
It's not about skills or talent or resources, it's about character. So at the very start of launching your company, the most important character trait is self-belief, is believing that you can. Because businesses, they feel like Mount Everest at your doorstep and they look like incredibly daunting tasks that you typically don't have a ton of experience in overcoming, right? You've never climbed Mount Everest before, you don't have the resources, you don't have to get up there, you don't have the experience to rely on.
So there has to be somewhat an extreme level of delusion slash self-belief to even want to start doing something you've never done before. And then when it comes to creating really innovative things, you're bringing something into the world that even the world hasn't seen. So that's where having a belief that this thing can exist and having that self-belief is also incredibly important. This is just kind of the inception point of the business.
And when you go out into the world and you start telling people about your amazing business idea and how successful you think you're going to be and you're going to be able to change the world in some type of way or solve the problem in a new way, you're going to get tons of positive feedback from your friends maybe, but also a ton of resistance. Whenever one of my friends starts a company, and they ask me for one piece of advice, I always say the same thing. I say, there's going to become a day in your company where things are just awful, where it's so unbelievably painful. I've never seen it not happen.
So I can say it with such a high degree of conviction that it is going to happen to you. So let's not argue about how you stop it happening because it'll find you at some point. Let's start thinking now about what it takes to overcome that day. It requires a ton of resilience.
It requires a ton of self-belief. It requires a certain temperament where someone defaults to logic and reason and not emotion because when emotion arrives on that day, then your decision-making will go down and you'll make really bad, poor decisions that often exacerbate the problem. But the first encounter of the 35 packages of bullshit will build evidence that you can overcome and I think that will compound in your favor over time. I think self-belief and resilience are probably the number one and number two character traits of anybody that wants to be wildly successful.