Today's Guest

International bestselling author Jay Samit is a dynamic entrepreneur and intrapreneur who is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on disruption and innovation. Jay is the former Independent Vice Chairman of Deloitte and an adjunct professor at USC. Jay shared his insight on what he has learned about creating successful companies and the entrepreneur mindset that anyone can apply to live a purpose-filled life.

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Episode Summary

For years I’ve been telling people, whether by choice or by circumstance, every career gets disrupted. Post pandemic I don’t have to make that argument anymore. We are living in an era of endless innovation and you can choose to either be terrified by that reality or excited. If you are working at a job that doesn’t satisfy you, where they pay you just enough to show up but not enough to care have you asked yourself why. Instead, why not try to live a life of purpose and fulfillment by pursuing what is meaningful to you. 

Whether you choose to believe it or not every business will be disrupted. Most people think of the obvious examples like a truck driver being replaced by a self-driving truck or AI systems replacing accountants and middle management. We hold a device in our pocket more powerful than all the computers NASA used to put a man on the moon. Yet, we can also use that device to connect to 7 billion potential customers around the world. 

After writing Disrupt You, I get what I call love letters daily from readers that tell me how much the book changed their lives. But occasionally I get an email from a young person that says something along the lines of, this is great but I can’t do it. So I said okay, my message isn’t getting through to young people so how can I fix that. I found a young man who, on paper, seemed like he had everything going against him. And I told him a simple lie based on the psychological phenomenon called the Pygmalion effect. What I told him was I interviewed over 100 candidates and he was the only one with all the attributes to be a self-made millionaire. For the next year, I simply provided him with coaching and nothing else and a year later he was able to hit that millionaire mark. 

When I talk to large audiences and lecture all over the world, inevitably somebody pitches me an idea and what I generally tell them is that their idea sucks. Because ideas come from the outside it's not till you get deep into it where you have the insights that no one sitting on the sidelines would have learned. Try to destroy your idea, try to find everybody that will tell you what's wrong with it and kill it. When you find that idea that can’t be killed, then go raise money and build a business around that it. Because what will happen if you don’t do those steps ahead of time you’ll raise a bunch of money and build a team only to realize your idea doesn’t work. 

You should think of every business as a high-tech startup. You need to figure out how to run your business on data, many local business owners focus all their energy working in the business instead of on it. Whether you’re a plumber, an electrician, or any other local business, how are people discovering you and finding out about your services? And how can you better target those people so you can lower your customer acquisition costs and increase the customer lifetime value? They are the same concepts the big companies use but they apply equally as well to local businesses. 

Resources Shared

• Disrupt You! By Jay Samit
• Future Proofing You by Jay Samit
  

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