Be Competitive. FRIDAY FIRE #5
Host: Isaac Mashman · July 18, 2020 · Episode 33 · 16 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
What is going on? Welcome back to another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the podcast. I'm your host, and you are listening to the show whose goal is to get you to live without limitations and go chase after your vision. You see, I believe that there is something that we can learn from everybody, and it is my goal to help teach you, to help make your journey a little bit easier, even in the slightest. So guys, I have an amazing episode lined up today. This is an episode of Friday Fire. Now, Friday Fire episodes are shorter than my normal episodes. They're 10 to 15 minutes long.
I basically go and talk about a specific skill, a specific subject, and it's nonstop heat. It's, I don't know, just something to kind of get you through the weekend and to lift you up a little bit more than any of the other episodes.
So before I jump into the amazing thing that I have to talk about today, something that I'm really inspired to speak on, I would like to ask a favor of you guys. Yes, I am asking a favor. You see, unlike other entrepreneurs, other podcast hosts, other business owners, all that, I am not spending an enormous amount of money. I'm actually spending zero dollars right now on marketing this show. I am also not going to sell my brand and sell my podcast and sell and barter your time to run a whole bunch of advertisements and a whole bunch of sponsors that I don't believe in. You see, a lot of other hosts do that. They spend 10 to 15 minutes talking about some crappy drop-shipped products from Alibaba that came from China and all this other crap.
I'm not going to do that, guys. But in doing so, I am sacrificing money, and I am sacrificing money and capital that I could otherwise put towards growing the show. So guys, help me out. I am giving you guys value. I am delivering value to you. So if you get that value and it is received, I challenge you, for every single episode you listen to (not just one episode and it's a one-time thing, no, every episode you listen to), share this show with a friend. Post on your story, post on Twitter, post on your Facebook, tag me, and tell people why they should be listening to Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the podcast. That would be a tremendous help to me, and I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. So let us dive right in.
Now, I've mentioned this on a variety of different occasions, and I've talked about how social media and the age of the internet and the age of the Instagram entrepreneur and the gurus make a whole lot of buzzwords in society. You go to Instagram and it is filled with a ton of buzzwords. You see a whole bunch of different quotes. You see a whole bunch of different things telling you to meditate, telling you to go ahead and write down these affirmations and your [daily success message], this, that, and the other. And it's like, okay, well, all you have to do to become successful is hustle, hustle, hustle, grind, grind, stay up, drink a whole bunch of coffee, all this other crap.
There are some quotes and some things and some cliches that are true. A lot of cliches are accurate, and a lot of them have a message behind them, but at the same exact time, not all of them are accurate. Then you also don't know who you are learning from, who you are being taught by.
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One of the things that I had an issue with was learning from people. I was very careful with who I listened to, and because of that, a lot of people called me uncoachable. A lot of people told me that I had a low teachability index, simply because I didn't want to learn from a 21 or 22 or 23-year-old who was making 10, even $25,000 a month. I was like, you're young. You have a level of success, but you don't have the level of success that I really want. So I jumped up to the people at the top of the company, the people who were making six and seven figures every single month.
Those were the people I wanted to listen to. I didn't want to spend time listening to regurgitated information that was passed 20 generations down. You see, every single time you learn information and teach it to another person, it becomes another generation of taught information.
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We're all here in it together. We can be friends. We can grow together. That's a whole bunch of bullshit. That is a whole bunch of bullshit. Now, before you click off and before you're like, oh wow, okay, this is about to be a rant, this isn't a rant. But there is some truth to it. We could be friends. If you're a close friend of mine, somebody who I know, and you're in a similar business field, I do not want to steal your business, and I do not want to walk on your success. However, at the core, we are still competitors. We are competitors. What does it mean to compete? It's almost like a sport. You're fighting for something. You're fighting for attention.
You're fighting for a fan. You're fighting for a follower. You're fighting for a sale. You're fighting for something. You're trying to be the best. You see, this internet age has made it so it's taboo to be ruthless in business. It is taboo to be cutthroat. It's like if you're not emotionally gentle, and if you're not like, oh, I want everybody to win, then you're going to be looked at as some selfish, narcissistic prick. But in reality, guys, that is the core principle of business. As long as you do something ethically, there's absolutely nothing wrong with being highly competitive. Now, what a lot of people get wrong, a lot of people who are super ego-driven, is they focus on one competitor.
That is how family feuds got started hundreds of years ago. I'm not talking about the TV show. That is how arguments and wars began, because it was one testosterone-driven male trying to fight another testosterone-driven male.
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You are not spending time understanding and learning what you can do to build a better company. That is where it becomes toxic. Same thing with following celebrities, like Keeping Up with the Kardashians. If you are spending time paying attention to their lives, or these influencers' lives, or what these people have got going on and the content they're creating, yet you're not spending any time creating your own content or living your own life or building up a name for yourself to have other people follow you, that is when it becomes a negative thing. So how do you navigate this? If you can't focus on just one person, but you should also focus on competition to an extent, it's like, okay, what are you trying to get across, Isaac? What I am telling you to do is recognize the competition.
Recognize and be aware that you are in competition with other people. You're not going to become super successful without having some level of competition. You're going to have a competitor. Think about MySpace. MySpace went under because Facebook came up. Twitter, all of these different social media platforms, they were combating for users to a specific degree. TikTok is combating Instagram. One person is combating another person, and it's all competition. However, like I said, don't focus on one specific competitor, but be aware of it. Be aware of the fact that, hey, you need to go ahead and do something that will make you stand out, or do something that will get you that fan, that will get you that follower.
You need to do something or offer a service or a product that is exceptionally better than the competition so you can get the sale, so you can make the money, so you can go ahead and change somebody's life with the service that you're offering. You should be aware of and leverage this competition and make it fuel to your fire. Fire, rather. Man, what was that word? Fire? Oh man, I don't even know what I said. But anyways, guys, use it as fuel. Humans are, to an extent, ego-driven. We're emotionally driven creatures. 80% of all sales is emotion-based, and 20% is logic-based. So with that knowledge, having a little bit of that ego and having a little bit of that, hey, I'm going to make it about me, there's nothing wrong with that.
The people who tell you that there's something wrong with that do not have the results you want, because in order to become successful, you need to become selfish to an extent. You need to be selfish to become successful, because how do you expect to fill up another person's cup if your cup is empty? You cannot. You cannot save somebody on a plane that is going down if your mask is not on first. You have to be selfish. In terms of business and social media, you can help other people grow. You can help other companies. You can help other people. You don't have to view everybody as some competitor that you have to beat.
But you also need to understand that that's all the more reason why you need to do everything in your power to be the very best you can possibly be.
Offer the best product, the best content, the best of everything. The best of everything. Don't go into something, just trying to try it. No, go into something being like, I'm burning the ships. Hernán Cortés, I believe it was, whenever he came over to America, he was like, we are either taking over this land or we are dying. We burn the ships. We are not going back. You have to have that mentality in every single thing that you do in life, whether that's your health, whether that's relationships, whether that's business, whether that's content creation or building up a brand. [Take] Leonardo DiCaprio, whenever he was first working on the role of Jordan Belfort for The Wolf of Wall Street. I've listened to a lot of different interviews that Jordan Belfort has done and heard an immense amount of conversation.
The one thing that DiCaprio did was he spent time with Belfort. He learned every single thing, his body [language], his tonalities, his posture, all of that. If you pay attention to Jordan Belfort in real life and then you go and watch The Wolf of Wall Street, you are going to see so many different parallels. DiCaprio went into the role being the very best he could be. He was like, I am going to go all in with this. When it comes to your health, you want to know why you're out of shape? Even if you go to the gym, even if you go to the gym for 30 minutes a day or even an hour a day, you want to know why you're out of shape? It's because you are not going all in. I remember when I was weightlifting back in high school with my buddy Kevin McDonald.
He and I had kind of this fierce competition between one another. He didn't know it at the time, but I had this thing, because he was always skinnier than me. He was in better shape than me, and I was like, I've got to beat this kid. I've got to at least stay on his level and beat him. Because of that, I was working to be the very best. I was in competition with this dude, and it was a friendly feud. It wasn't a toxic feud. Notice the difference. There's a big difference there. But the one thing that we both did was we went all in, and within a matter of that one year of weightlifting, we hit so many different maxes.
We hit so many different records, yet nobody else in the class was progressing. You want to know why they were not progressing? Because they were bitching. They were sitting around, and they weren't putting effort in. They'd hit a rep, and it would be a low rep, and they weren't even breaking a sweat during the class. Kevin and I were outside in the sun. We were putting in 110% of our effort. We were going all in, and that is the same mentality that you have to have in every single thing. Burn the ships or don't even take the trip, period. Go all in and work to be the very best version of yourself, because if you do not, and if you do not try to be the best in everything, somebody else is going to steal from your plate.
Somebody else will take the food that should be on your plate. You've got to earn this. Nothing in life comes for free. You only deserve what you work for. That's the God's honest truth. So that being said, guys, thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the podcast. Like I said at the very beginning of the show, if you got one ounce of value, make sure to share this with a friend of yours, and stay tuned for future episodes. New episodes are coming every Monday and every single Friday, here to get you to live without limitations and really recognize the amount of potential that you have.
Now, before I go, artists and musicians, I am specifically working with you guys for the foreseeable future, over the next couple of years. I am going to help as many artists as I can have super successful brands and really get the respect that you guys deserve in your craft, taking it from treating your artistry like a hobby to treating it like a full-scale career. So if you're an artist or a musician, DM me on all social media @IsaacMashman, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and go to my website, isaacmashman.com. Much love, and always live without limitations.