I need to, right?
So I'm gonna do this.
I'm gonna be right back.
I'm gonna let you lead the way
and I'll hear everything that you say.
So in terms of University of Texas,
choosing the Longhorns,
I mean, there's really no other choice out there
than being a Longhorn.
But what made you choose that
and what's your experience been?
Yeah, well, thanks for having me on.
Ready and really excited for the rest of the show.
It's been a lot of fun.
Definitely had a lot of opportunities,
still have a lot of opportunities coming forward
that I don't imagine I would have had
under any other circumstances or any other university.
UT Austin is a great school,
right with great education and great,
student organizations, student life,
all that stuff that you can really hope for in a university.
There's troves of it.
So really, really grateful.
You know it, baby.
You know it.
I wear this hat probably in 10 to 15% of my podcasts.
Hides my hair when I don't have
my Matthew McConaughey look going on.
But you have both today, so it's all good.
That's right.
We gotta get him on the show in the future.
Right on, right on, right on.
All right, so Michael, I gotta ask, man.
You're doing so much.
President, student media, vice president,
you founded a company as well.
And you got so many opportunities.
How did you, where does that drive for priorities come from?
How did you discover that so young?
I will certainly say it's a necessity.
And when you have sort of a necessity
in having to manage your time,
you tend to get most out of that time.
At least that's been my experience.
So you really are forced to prioritize
for better, for worse.
You definitely have to kick some stuff down a little bit
when certain things come up, expectedly and unexpectedly.
But I think just naturally good time management,
developing that skill,
it's still something that I'm developing
and will develop until I'm way older.
You know?
Yeah, right?
So, but I think my parents
have excellent time management skills too.
Really set a good example for me.
And just been really fortunate and blessed
to have certain opportunities and certain things,
one of which is going to UT.
So that kind of stuff.
It's always good to have kind of a time fire under you.
And I always kind of have one under me.
Absolutely, I love that.
You know, and for those of you who don't have parents,
that secret power of parents that exists there,
you can find and adopt parents, by the way.
You can find and adopt role models.
I mean, I was fortunate.
My mom's like extremely good with time management.
My dad, who wasn't around as often,
but when I was living with him,
very, very little time management skills.
I could have chosen either path, right?
And I chose to gravitate more towards my mom's path,
even though I would say my personality
aligns much more with who my father is.
So we've usually got those choices in life.
And if I could say anything to those who are out there,
living the dream and young,
it's that life's gonna get busier and busier.
So the sooner you develop those priorities
and focus on the things that you want later,
the more likely you are to achieve greatness
and enjoy the whole journey along the way.
So thanks for that insight.
We'll cut to the break and we'll be right back, everybody.
All right, welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
With Jackson Calame, I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs
and guest leaders who are building fantastic visions
out there.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm your show host, Jackson Calame,
founder and CEO of First Class Business.
I am so excited to have Michael Lazenby on the show.
I can't wait to bring him on stage.
I've been waiting for this moment for a few days, actually,
really thinking about this episode,
because I'm so excited to have Michael Lazenby on the show.
I can't wait to bring him on stage.
I've been waiting for this moment for a few days, actually,
because to me, he represents the future of visionaries.
We name this episode, Empowering Dreams,
Entrepreneurship as a Great Equalizer with Michael Lazenby.
He really influenced that.
He sees entrepreneurship as a great equalizer.
I haven't talked to him too much
about what that means to me yet.
In fact, we haven't talked about that at all yet together.
But I saw the same thing when I was much younger
and realized, whoa, what this country was founded on
and built on was entrepreneurship and freelance work.
And corporate America has been a little bit of a distraction
from that reality, in my opinion.
We might come back to that later in the show.
But before I bring Michael on,
a couple of quick shout outs to different resources
that are available for people in terms of sponsorships.
In this case, both of the sponsors for our show today
are clients of ours.
One of them is the Wellness Shop 365.
And the Wellness Shop is built by Sean LeChuga.
Sean and Juliana LeChuga, they're a power couple,
great family, they have excellent values.
I've really enjoyed working with them.
They're in the middle of overhauling their branding.
And when I saw this,
Cynthia, can you please lower it a little bit
until the wheel?
I got my assistant Cynthia behind the scenes helping out.
This is what caught my eye,
the 365 Harmony of Life Wheel Assessment
and how they're not only looking at life
from a nutrition standpoint,
in terms of diet and exercise,
but I saw that they were really tracking,
what's joy and spirituality, creativity, finances, career.
I was like, whoa, there is extreme balance in this.
So while there's still an opportunity to optimize
and refine the wheel itself and how it's delivered,
the principles are what I pay attention to
when I'm looking for clients, prospects,
and when I'm looking for solutions for my own life.
And so this really caught my attention.
And then as I started to work with them,
I just loved the balance and holistic nature
of who they are and what they're up to,
the vision sound.
Then on the other side,
we've got Melissa Gray from The Law Spot.
She was also a guest.
I highly recommend checking her episode out.
She's an attorney and she's building a platform
for entrepreneurs to get a strong legal counsel
and a base for their foundation
that doesn't have to be complicated.
And once again, I saw this entrepreneur
who not only has the ability to be
that the attorney we think of on TV,
but also one who nurtures,
one who understands that there's concepts related
to legal and law that people are kind of scared of
and you don't know where to go.
And there's also these really high retainer fees
on one side.
On the other side, you got these programs like The Law Depot.
Nothing wrong with them, good program,
but it's a bit too watered down to be able to go to that,
go to that resource and have the right representation
for yourself.
So she's looking to bridge the gap for the middle ground
so that small and medium businesses have legal counsel
they can go to and trust.
And I can tell you after working with hundreds and hundreds,
very possibly thousands and thousands
of the entrepreneurs I've worked with,
I would venture to guess that maybe two to 5%,
if I were to ask them, who's your legal counsel,
if you get into a situation, they wouldn't know.
They'd probably go to Google and find something.
And out of the two to 5% that have it,
they're probably overpaying considerably
for somebody who's also so busy,
they're probably not gonna give them great attention.
So that's the type of gap that Melissa's looking to bridge
and I find that super honorable.
Last and of course not least are the causes.
And in this case, we like to talk about the water project.
The water project is something that I try to remember daily
and think about often because most of us listening in,
we have access to clean drinking water every single day.
I don't have to think about it, I go right to my kitchen.
There's millions of people who do not.
And the children or the parents are pulled out of school
or out of work for their communities to go get water.
And they usually have to travel three to five miles
in order to get it.
And it's a bucket, whatever they have
and are able to carry themselves.
And they don't even know if that water is safe.
And so the water project has created transparency
around which communities they're able to support and help,
what exactly they're building.
And the cool thing is even if you only give a dollar
to that cause, you then get to see
how the project transforms and what happens.
They use social proof to show you, okay,
here's what's happening,
here's what we're teaching these people about maintaining it.
It's a very empowering process.
And you also saw on the screen if you're watching,
these kids celebrating water, like it's Christmas day.
I mean, the amount of gratitude they have
for the basic needs of life absolutely humbles me.
And so even if you're not in a position financially
to share that, I would ask that you just share
the experience, share the site with somebody.
You never know, you might be the person who touches somebody
who spends a million dollars on helping that project.
You might have a friend that shares $5.
All contributions always help.
We have 8 billion people in this world to be able to help.
So if there's some other project that you know of
that inspires you more and you're like,
man, I wish this guy would talk about this project.
Also drop that link in the comments.
We're all about giving back.
We'll definitely check it out.
And if it's something that we also feel
we should put on the show as well and say,
hey, check this project out.
We might just do that and you might be the catalyst
for a lot of good.
So without further ado, I'm gonna dive into
Michael Lazenby's background a little bit.
And so we're gonna go, one thing that caught me,
he's got that Mark Cuban path as well.
He's already started macrohint.com.
He's a founder of this program to help people
with the stock market analysis and understanding finances
as an econ major.
And then he's also the president of the texastudentmedia.com
at the Moody College of Communication
at the University of Texas at Austin.
And in addition to that, he's the VP, one of the VP
presidents of the University of Texas at Austin
Student Foundations.
So Michael, thank you for being on the show today.
We're so happy to have you.
It's a pleasure to be here, Jackson.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, absolutely, man.
I have never hosted a future president
in the United States before.
So this is absolutely my honor.
Well, let me know when you do.
I'll be amazing when you find out.
Man, you got so much going on.
So what got you into being so involved
in the student body and the media,
the publications related to informing the school
what's going on and the foundation?
I would certainly say that a little background is needed.
And with that, I'm actually a transfer student.
So I transfer from a school really far away
in North Dakota, oddly enough.
So really, really cold to really, really hot.
That's the state, right?
Yeah, right.
I'm just kidding.
That's so Texan of me.
It's totally valid.
Don't worry.
But I didn't know anybody in Austin.
So I had to make friends somehow
through some student organization before classes started
and do something just to kind of get my foot
in the door in that respect.
And then just happened to apply as an opinion columnist.
Writing is okay at the time.
I was kind of enjoying it, but my mother actually has,
I think she passed down her writing gene to me.
She's a writer by trade.
Nice.
So I definitely inherited that.
And then just thankfully got offered a position
as an opinion columnist at the Daily Texan.
And then over time, rose to the ranks,
had a lot of great opportunities
given by a lot of different people, a lot of great timing.
And now currently serve as the president of Texas student
media and also a board member as well.
So it's been a lot of fun.
So really enjoying it.
That's amazing.
That it makes me wanna dive into the power lessons.
And I'm not supposed to do that too late in the show
because I wanna talk to you about diplomacy
since you've gained some idea
of how diplomacy works at a young age.
I had no diplomacy at your age.
So that's why I wanna pick your brain
for the sake of my kids, but I'll withhold.
First things first, you can take this
from the macro hint level.
You can actually feel free to define this
for all three ventures or beyond.
But typically what's your vision for those that you serve?
Well, I'll start with the website.
The website is really, really geared towards
making finance, investing, the stock market,
knowledge of the economy, things like that,
far more accessible than it has ever been.
That is a really, really big part
of what we do and focus on.
It's really, really important that we distill,
but don't really dilute information or dilute information.
A lot of different ways to do that.
But I personally started writing,
I've just started a blog during COVID
really out of boredom and needed to do something.
And then just started gaining traction.
I guess some people were enjoying what I was writing about,
just different opinions on different stocks.
And of course, based on the fundamentals,
looking at cashflow statements, balance sheets,
income statements, et cetera.
And then it was really, yeah, there's the name of the day.
And then I was really, really happy
to get some different partnerships, sponsorships,
and actually start monetizing the website
through that after just gaining more and more traction.
So that's been a lot of fun for sure.
Awesome.
And let's look at the path for this.
So the vision for those you serve,
what's the other end to look like?
If somebody follows what it is that you're putting down
and they decided to make some adjustments in their life,
what's the outcome look like?
Well, ultimately what we wanna do is make it
so that investing isn't so scary.
I think the thing is investing itself,
maybe having a brokerage account
or being able to buy a cryptocurrency or a stock
has become really democratized
with all the different platforms,
think Robinhood, think all these other ones.
But I don't think that knowledge of investing
and really easy to digest knowledge of investing
has been easily accessible.
So the industry has kind of been lagging behind
in that respect.
So that's the gap that we aim to fill.
And in terms of what the end viewer gets and what they get,
I mean, we've received, my friends will tell me,
I'll get messages telling me, this is great work,
really appreciate it.
So that is really awesome to me.
Outside of the business context,
like you kind of alluded to before,
it's really about impact,
not just impact on all levels, I'll say.
So a lot of positive feedback for sure
from all corners of the world.
Awesome.
Okay, and then let's move into the vision
for the entrepreneurs.
You talked about entrepreneurship as a great equalizer
and empowering people's dreams.
What's your vision as far as that goes?
I think today it's very,
I mean, kind of speaking of democratized platforms,
it is far easier, and you can definitely speak to this
to start a business than it ever has been
with platforms like Etsy, Shopify, Fiverr,
all these different platforms.
You can like freelance work like you alluded to before.
You can really, it's a lot easier to do that
than it ever has been.
And I think that I would love for more people
to really gravitate towards that,
use their own ideas, use their own skillsets,
stuff like that, that maybe a lot of other people
don't have and execute on those,
even if it's considered if they fail
or something like that, at least they try.
You never know until you do try, obviously.
So I think that is really important.
Also just in a risk-taking context,
I think there's a really, really kind of messed up notion
out there that if you wanna be an entrepreneur,
you have to be all in.
You have to put yourself in some form of financial crisis.
You have to, yeah.
And you certainly have to be committed for sure.
I have learned that over the last three years
of this website being up,
you have to be very committed for sure.
However, I would say that it can still be very rewarding,
very fun, and also just you can learn so much about yourself.
So if all else fails in someone's venture,
I would hope that they would take so much
and understand that they can take so much
from learning about themselves, their capabilities,
strengths and weaknesses,
and then just pick themselves back up.
Absolutely.
I will, if you don't mind,
I will speak to some of those truths
because you nailed it.
And I might start in reverse order,
which is if my venture failed within the next couple of weeks,
couple of months, there is no greater refiner's fire
that I could have possibly been in for shaping,
turning into who I want to be
for the sake of my four children.
So that's a big aspect for me is I get to
not only be my best self,
but even being on this podcast and going live,
sometimes I interview people
that are fairly difficult to interview.
And it puts me in a position to where I have to
learn diplomacy skills on the fly,
and say, okay, how do I help honor my audience
while not torching this person and honoring their vision?
And if I don't have the live component of that,
it can be a lot easier to just kind of like go at them,
rather than patiently see how can I,
again, nobody's gonna die.
It's just an opinion.
Let's figure this out together.
So there's dynamics and aspects like that
with entrepreneurship every day that you have to go through
to serve those that you're serving,
whether it's team members,
whether it's, you can't just escape the problems
that come your way as an entrepreneur
or with a team especially.
In addition, you did say that it's easier to start on,
become an entrepreneur than it ever has been.
And there's a twist to that though.
It's also easier for me to start any single type of business
that I could possibly want to start or be distracted by.
And that there's danger in that.
Also, ironically, the success rate for entrepreneurship,
as far as I've seen in the data,
I can manipulate the data to make this
a much easier, friendlier path,
if I wanted to convince more people
to go into entrepreneurship.
But the data shows 96% of business owners
fail within 10 years.
What often is looked at on that,
if you're an optimist, is, oh man, it's 4% succeed.
4% of people survive.
And I see that over and over with the entrepreneurs
I talk to, whether it's the amount of debt that they carry,
and whether it's the unscalable nature of their business
and the hustle and grind that they face.
And Gary Vaynerchuk has an absolute place in this world.
In fact, I love his content.
However, his audience, his core audience,
is hustling, grinding to get out of the ghetto.
His core audience is to get out of these circumstances
where you don't have a circle of five or 10 around you
to sustain you and support you.
He's not talking to some rich kid
who lives in the suburbs of San Antonio,
and saying, grind, hustle,
get out of your amazing, mediocre lifestyle.
We love to polarize opportunities.
And so there's a hustle and grind factor
that can be helpful, but you're right.
You don't have to throw everything in the kitchen sink
at entrepreneurship.
You can be more balanced about how you approach it,
and you can maintain an open mind
that even though you came from the suburbs,
even though you came from an ICM,
that still may be your call.
What I've learned and what I appreciate,
why I named this Vision Pros,
is because I believe that everybody
has a vision for themselves.
And I believe that you are your visionary.
And if there's people out there who can guide you, awesome.
But if there's people who try to take the wheel from you
and tell you, you should do this,
you should be a dentist, Michael.
I know you should be a dentist.
I don't have the authority to give you that.
What I do have though, so I'll make one plug before we move,
is I've got an assessment that has helped people
tremendously with reshaping the direction
of where they wanna go in life.
And usually the sooner they take this, the better.
Most people haven't aligned their entrepreneurial pursuit
with their absolute passions.
And so I created this assessment years ago
for helping people discover the passion
and live a life of purpose and fulfillment.
And no, that is not the easy path, just to be clear.
That is the path of what I would consider enjoyment.
The journey will be difficult.
But when I'm living for what it is I believe in most,
I take that life over billions of success any day
if I have to make a choice.
I don't though, the law of abundance says I can pursue both.
So thank you for letting me go off on that.
Any other thoughts before we move on to your vision?
Like for yourself.
I would just generally say,
I would definitely encourage people to think about
just generally what they're naturally good at.
Even if someone isn't even, is working somewhere
and really deep in their career
or really just confused a college student like myself,
not really knowing what they wanna do.
Really hone in on what you're naturally good at.
Like get away from the phone, get away from your friends,
sit down in a room and just think really, really objectively,
what am I really, really good at?
What do I have an edge on somebody on?
What am I really good at painting?
Is that just a gift that I have?
Am I really good at podcasting?
Something like that, I think that that is one of the huge
genesis of the website that I started.
Like it's very, very important to really start
with that first because it is super unsustainable
if you are just focused on other things, maybe money,
lifestyle, all that kind of stuff.
That is very, very, very bad path to go down
in any sort of venture.
So definitely think about your core skills.
I've seen it and I even, it's weird to see entrepreneurs
who are ultra successful, but you consult with them
on the back end and you see them break down and cry
about the reality of what they're faced with
or how stuck they feel in situations.
$20 million in annual revenues
and you get a million dollars in personal debt.
There's realities that people can't see on the surface
and I wouldn't expose about any specific person,
but I see it time and time again.
And it's usually those who have followed the pursuit
of financial gain or an external metric
rather than the internal focus.
So Strengths Finder 2.0 by the way,
one of the best books you could possibly read
for those who are listening in and do the assessment.
You have to buy it brand new to do the assessment.
The assessment can teach you about your five strengths,
what you are best at and my number one strength,
I thought was one of my greatest weaknesses
because I wasn't a good student
and my number one strength is a learner,
but I was a.33 GPA kid at Brigham Young University.
And no, it was, I thought, man, I'm terrible
at this student thing and learning.
Just had a different style of learning.
So Michael, what's your vision for you?
What do you see for yourself over the next,
who knows how long?
Definitely having my own business, maintaining that.
We've been growing, acquiring new advertising partners,
tapping into new streams of revenue, things like that.
So really, really growing in that respect
and also just leveraging as many resources as I can.
At a school like UT, I will concede
that is a really big advantage.
Having so many things, we have UT Launchpad,
which is a partnership with Blackstone for Ventures
and we have Venture Labs and all that kind of stuff.
So it's really great to have those resources,
but just making the most out of those resources
is a really, really big priority.
And then outside of business, I will say,
just tap, I'd like to think of it
as being a sculpture in a sense.
You keep hewing down to how you can be the sharpest,
the best that you can be.
And I think a lot of what translates to business success
is really, really correlated to life success
and that's super subjective, obviously.
But all that to say, it's really hard
to have some sort of facade or something like that
in the business world and then people see you one way
in the business world and then they see you
a completely different way or in a different light,
outside of class or in class
or something completely different.
So I think maintaining good habits,
keeping that at the forefront of whatever I'm doing,
business or school or being a tour guide at the university,
one of my other little side hustles.
So stuff like that, definitely just hewing down
what I can add value to, how I can add value
and then also just really sharpening skills.
You remind me of one of the best leaders
that I ever met at university
and his name is Jordan Angelos.
Anybody feel free, you might wanna look him up
if you're on the business path, but Jordan and I,
we were dorm mates, not roommates,
but dorm mates first year.
And he was what we call Mr. DT.
He's the only one, the Mr. Good looking, et cetera,
talented of Deseret Towers,
our buildings that we live near campus.
And then he was fun, he was engaging,
everybody loved him, he led so many things,
but I was so busy making the most of my social activities
that I missed out on most of the important things
I could have been doing.
Fast forward several years, right?
And I was three years after, we both got on missions,
he went to Finland, learned Finnish,
I went to Europe, I learned Spanish.
Fast forward another couple of years
and I go back to see where are my dorm mates?
Where is everybody at these days?
And I see that Jordan, by the time we were 23 or 24,
was a venture capitalist.
And I was like, holy crap, what the heck?
And I looked at his LinkedIn and I went through his profile
and I was assessing, oh, while we were there
that freshman year, I believe he started an internship
at Goldman Sachs, if I remember correctly.
And I'm like, how the heck did he have time to that
and time to go to class?
And then we go on our missions, he comes back
and he gets involved in more and more.
In Goldman Sachs, I think Charles Schwab,
I don't remember exactly, you can go look on LinkedIn
and see this.
And he did college right.
He was involved in these activities.
And I was looking at it going,
I didn't know any of this stuff existed.
I was like, I didn't know how to do college right.
I didn't pay attention enough in high school
and in the college path to realize
what I could have been using as opportunities.
So again, anybody who's in that university,
it doesn't matter, if you take my path,
you can still find success, you can still do great things.
You can still have a great life.
However, if you have the opportunity to pay attention now,
my invitation is use that network, use that opportunity
just like Michael talked about,
because you can't possibly see all the outcomes
of the future, but if you follow that law of the harvest
of planting the right seeds, the fruits will come.
The opportunities will arise.
So I am curious for you though,
you had a lot of best leadership experiences.
What's been your worst leadership experience
that you've ever had?
Candidly, I would say that my worst has also been my best,
especially in hindsight,
maybe not in the moment when it was happening,
but certainly in hindsight.
We had actually an issue with the website
and it was really overloaded, it was stressed.
There were a lot of backend things
that I was not really aware of
and I had never encountered this issue before.
And this was the most stressful part of the business so far.
And this was about maybe a year ago thereabouts.
And the website was continuously crashing.
There were so many different issues with it
and things like that.
It was just really overloaded.
So I guess the good about that is I had to adapt
and I had to adapt quickly
because I had no other choice.
You had it, it goes back to necessity,
which is a gift in more senses than none.
You definitely have to adapt.
And when you have to pivot,
you have to pivot pretty hard usually.
So talk about resources, I actually reached out,
it's very strange, but one of my professors,
former professors has a son-in-law
who was a chief technology architect
at a major hedge fund out East.
And then he actually gave me his email and told me,
hey, just reach out to him,
see if he can help you with the issue.
And then I reached out to him and really, really grateful
that he reached out to me expeditiously
and helped me out and my team out.
And we fixed it almost expeditiously
following that as well.
So that was very stressful, a lot going on
outside of being a student and on top of being a student
and on top of all these other obligations.
But it was really, the good was definitely
to see that I could adapt,
that my team could adapt and pivot.
And it's so much better now.
We have fixed it 100% actually.
Of course, there's always gonna be little snafus
and hiccups, but we're always ready to adapt now.
That's the blessing and all that.
Absolutely, have you ever eaten at Uchi or Uchiko?
I have not.
It's time to go soon.
It is a pretty penny, but they were rated in 2010,
they were rated a top 10 restaurant in America
right down the road from the University of Texas.
And one of my startups, we do reservation software.
So we're working with Uchi and Uchiko
and it was Valentine's Day coming up.
And just like you, you not only had the stress of that,
you had the stress of life, you had papers due,
you had classes to attend,
you had your student body to pay attention to,
you got tours you wanna do,
you got a personal life that you wanna live as well.
All of these aspects.
And so these moments of slowdown or screeching halts,
it derails everything in addition to the pain
that it is in and of itself.
So here we were coming into Valentine's Day
and the founder of our company
who was our main chief technology officer
had accidentally made a mistake, not his fault.
It just happens, life happens, right?
But for Valentine's Day,
one of the top restaurants in the entire world,
we had accidentally doubled their reservation booking system.
They had twice as many reservations
as they could handle on Valentine's Day itself.
And when we figured this out,
it was 48 hours before Valentine's Day.
And we had, so we go in and they're so upset,
but they handled it so well.
And we said, you know what?
You know, we'll make all these calls for you
and we'll tell them this was our fault, not yours.
But I'm talking about calling people from Canada,
calling people from Israel, calling people from Brazil
who are saying this is why we're coming to Austin, Texas
for our, and we had to call them up and own this matter.
And again, derail our own agendas.
So these opportunities in life show up.
And yes, I do call them opportunities.
You know, do we rise to the occasion?
Do we exercise the strength, you know,
or do we, is it the time to quit and say,
you know what, you handle this, I'm just gonna leave.
Right, we have choices in all these types of moments.
Sounds like your team really rose to the occasion
in relation to that.
So what's another best leadership experience that you have?
I think I'm still kind of living it.
If that's, it sounds a little cheesy for sure, but-
I love it, I like cheesy.
Yeah, I mean, I think just translating something
that started out, I had no intention
of turning the website into a business at all,
starting out, it was really just kind of a COVID
passion project, like just, I had really,
it was a weird time, I didn't, wasn't in school,
didn't have much to do, so I had this kind of window
of opportunity and I thought, well,
my mom actually told me, like, you're gonna do this.
Because I was watching way too much Friends,
way too much The Office.
I had to like do something productive.
So shout out to her, she really helped
and continues to help.
And then she, yeah, right?
And that was the main, like transitioning
from just a blog to something that is scalable,
proven already, and then also quite monetizable,
for lack of a better term.
That has been like extremely rewarding.
Really confidence building, really, really proud
of what's happened so far.
And I think it's just, that's been,
I don't think that experience is gonna end
for a very, very long time.
It's been really happy.
Yes, one of the best books I can ruin
for people right now, telling you the end of the story.
And this is a good one,
because it's a self-development book.
And maybe someday it'll be important
to all of you who don't have a business.
It's called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss.
And it's all about the power of negotiation
and the pinnacle of the story, the most important thing
that he shares in it, and those are pretty much
his words about it, is in negotiations,
the person who wins is a person who has nothing to lose.
Who has really nothing to gain on either.
And so if you want to be in a great position
to negotiate on your business's behalf,
then be in a position where you don't need the investors
as one of the best positions you can be in,
because now they have to give more to get involved.
So you start in a business at this time,
and we just want to give you that nugget
in case you don't already have it.
You stay in that position where you have control
over what happens and what comes along.
It puts the supply and demand in your favor
as that business owner, and you'll be able
to do what you want with your vision.
Yeah, thank you for that.
Absolutely, now it's your turn.
So for those visionaries listening in,
if this were the last lesson you could ever share in life
to help people with their visions,
what powerful lesson can other visionaries learn
from your experience so far?
I have plenty, but if I had to say one,
I would think follow your,
and I actually heard this from,
funny you mentioned Mark Cuban, I've heard this,
I think he said something like this way back,
follow your efforts, not your passions,
which sounds very strange,
especially in the context of what I've talked about so far,
but just to add some clarity to that,
I think following your efforts is very important
because it tends to actually reveal
what you're passionate about.
So there's a really, really defined intersection of that,
whether it's a restaurant business,
whether it's painting, whether it's freelancing,
whether it's running a finance blog,
whether it's whatever, even if it's just working
from a nine to five job somewhere in Silicon Valley,
anywhere, if you can really focus on
and track your effort historically,
the consistency thereof in different areas
where you've been really consistent
and really enjoy doing certain things,
then that kind of is your passion.
You can meld that and marry those two into a job
or kind of make a job for yourself
and really go on the entrepreneurial path.
I mean, that is excellence.
I really, really think self-awareness critical.
And then the last thing I'll say
is always consider where you can add value.
I think there's a lot of people that,
especially I'll call out my generation a little bit,
maybe some others, but a lot of people
wanna be the biggest, the baddest, the best, right?
And you should always wanna be the best, in my opinion.
You should always try to do your best,
not anyone else's best, but do your best.
And I say that because one of the things
that I really enjoy outside of business and school
is basketball, really into basketball.
And every so often, I'll go watch basketball games.
And it's actually minor league basketball games.
So you can actually afford to see the San Antonio Spurs
because of their draft pick they got recently.
So it's really, really hard, as you know,
to get tickets for that.
So what I'll do is go watch, yeah, oh, his last, yeah.
He broke the scoring record, it's amazing, yeah.
Go ahead, I'm on the same page.
Yeah, so I can't afford to go to Spurs games.
So I'll go to minor league games in Austin.
So their minor league team versus their NBA team
or their major league team.
And then I actually had the opportunity
to just kind of be in the same room as one of their coaches,
one of their assistant coaches.
And he was just kind of giving a talk to the fans,
just getting everyone excited and stuff like that.
And he said something to the extent of like,
it doesn't really matter.
Like someone was like, how did these players
from the minor league get to the major league?
How do they make that huge step?
And I was like, that's a great question.
He said something to the extent of,
it's not really important if they can drop
40 points a game, 20 rebounds, 30 blocks,
like these crazy superstar statistics.
It's really, because you already have people who can do that.
Always try to be your best.
And some people are anomalies that are just really,
really good at what they do.
But like the LeBron James, obviously the greatest
basketball player probably right now.
But those are very one-off scenarios.
So you're better off focusing and concentrating
your time and effort on where you can add value.
And he really alluded to that.
It's not about being the best player on the team.
It's about, because they already have that.
It's really, really important to focus on
what can you bring to the table?
What can you bring to a team that doesn't have it already?
Are you really good at communicating?
Are you really good at writing?
Are you really good at marketing?
Like find your niche and crush that niche.
Like those are, I know that's not necessarily
one piece of advice, but I think those are very important
and something that I have been reinforced in my head
time and time again.
So well said, and I want to honor LeBron James
on this reality is those who are listening
and are not watching, in that I would say
that combining it with honoring Mark Cuban,
following your efforts, LeBron James is a champion
that he is because he is also the champion of efforts
and all that I've ever seen him do.
And I studied that man's life far more
than I should ever admit.
He is just a champion in so many causes.
And so then there's this, the idea,
and then I think of Brock Purdy, that's his name, right?
The, I'm like, they get the right name,
the quarterback for the 49ers right now.
I mean, he was a D-League style individual coming in.
And again, it's those efforts that play a lot into it.
Don't get me wrong, there's talents and gifts
and variables that go beyond what it is we're doing.
But I was that young kid, Michael,
that I knew I needed to be the best.
That's what I knew I needed to be.
And I ended up in seventh grade, second chair trumpet
in the state of Texas.
And mentally, emotionally, I quit.
I quit because I wasn't the best at my level.
And that meant there was eighth graders
who were better than me.
There was ninth graders.
I mean, I did not feel like I had a place in this world
because I wasn't the best.
I had this horribly extreme attitude about growth
and what growth looks like.
It wasn't until I was about 30 years old
with a back surgery already.
I was also a super athlete, again, second in my school.
According to, I felt I was first, but didn't matter.
Like the mental block was already crushing me.
And so it was 30 running around a track last lap.
And I thought, you know, I could slow down now.
And I had to stop, what would LeBron James do?
You know, WWLJD. And anyway, I booked it.
I booked it and I went 20 yards extra.
And I was like, hmm, this moment,
this is a moment that what it feels like
to have that type of dedication and commitment
like LeBron James.
And he has built a life around being willing
to have those moments over and over and over
and over and over as consistently as possible.
And if I start doing that,
then I can start to have the same types of results
in my life in the sphere of what I build.
So just to, again, honor the fact that I do believe
full heartedly and what it is that you're talking about.
I hope more people understand the value,
but I love that you shifted to realizing too.
And you realize that it's so much younger than I did
and many others still don't know it.
If we be our best self, like that's it.
Like that's it.
Just go to bed at night knowing I did my best.
That also includes forgiving myself as best I can, right?
Being the best at forgiveness so that tomorrow
I'm not bogged down by guilt and shame for any shortcomings
that I can move forward being my best again.
So we've got a few extra minutes.
I'd love to know a little bit more
about any one of your activities.
What's MacroHint, Texas Student Media,
or the Student Foundation.
Are there any aspects of that that you'd like to share
in relation to the podcast and your vision?
Well, I'll actually plug one
that I didn't previously mention to you.
It's kind of a shout out to some of my friends
who I believe are actually watching right now.
It's the tour guide group, the Macartos.
So it's just a job at the university
where you just offer tours to prospective students
and their families and their friends and things like that.
It seems kind of random to bring that up,
but I think it is a really, really good idea.
And it's one of the main reasons I took such a job
is because you wanna,
there's all this talk about artificial intelligence,
a lot of maybe dehumanizing in that context,
things happening in the world,
a lot of separation in that respect.
But I still think that it is really, really critical.
And because of all the artificial intelligence
things out there, that it's even more important
to really, really sharpen hone in on your personal skills,
your people skills, getting up
and presenting in front of people.
That's been one of the biggest things
that I've really enjoyed about my job.
And I think that whether it's in the context of a job
or a volunteer organization or whatever it may be
at a dinner party, whatever that may look like,
I think finding ways that you can make yourself
slightly uncomfortable towards becoming more confident
in being a little, not to the extreme, obviously,
or to any extreme, but to be a lot more,
just get out of your comfort zone a little bit.
You never know what you're gonna figure out.
And I think it has served me really, really well.
So I have all these kind of prestigious organizations
at the university and then my business, which is amazing.
I'm really, really grateful for that.
But I also think you will find a lot of opportunities
in maybe not so common places.
So I would really urge people,
whether they're like entrepreneurship,
that is not for me, or people are like,
I wanna be an entrepreneur, that's all I wanna be.
Like finding ways that you can sharpen those,
I guess they call it soft skills.
I don't see it as that way at all.
I think they're critical skills.
Sharpen those skills, hone in on those skills
and get out of your comfort zone a little bit.
I urge anyone on that spectrum to do that,
whatever that may look like for them.
And I'm sure you could attest to that too.
I will, I appreciate it.
It's, we'll wait on your friends on this too,
but the tour aspect is huge.
And again, the EQ, emotional intelligence
of knowing how to collaborate with people,
how to talk to people, how to lead this future generation
that's going to be, that's using automatic weapons of word,
for establishing their powers.
You got me looking up like, man,
I know that quote, the pen is mightier than the sword.
I'm a big believer in it.
I couldn't find who the origin comes from,
but I did find a couple of interesting twists, right?
So, and this is what it does say.
One source says this Edward guy,
Edward Bulwer Lytton said the pen is mightier than the sword.
Thought it was interesting what Douglas MacArthur said.
I went to MacArthur High School actually.
He said, whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword,
obviously never encountered weapons before,
or automatic weapons.
But again, while that's scary and makes sense
in the time from which it was, which he was talking,
we now have automatic weapons of words.
And I also like what this guy said here,
the pen is mightier than the sword,
but the tongue is mightier than both put together,
Marcus Garvey.
And at the end of the day,
what's really being talked about,
and what I think our generation has the opportunity
to be aware of and lead from is realizing
that automation, if with the wrong wording,
can destroy your reputation and others faster
than almost anything.
And so I was looking up yesterday,
I've got a new executive assistant, she's phenomenal,
amazing, she's gonna be helping me on my emails,
transparently writing occasionally with her name on there.
And sometimes as she gets to know me really well,
she'll write my responses,
just like the president has somebody write for him,
or LeBron James has somebody write from him and beyond.
Oh, this is not something that we,
as little people in the world can't do.
In addition to that though,
I was looking for an AI that not only could draft the emails,
but an AI that automatically drafts a response
to every single email that I receive.
And I haven't found that yet, I'm looking for that one.
I don't want it to automatically reply to everybody,
it will lose the nuance.
Maybe over time I can train it to understand my principles
and my identity enough to where I can let it bridge the gap
and foster and cultivate great relationships
with the people whom I want to meet.
But what I see happening all over the market
is marketers are leveraging this
to shove offers down people's throats
and to unnaturally try to progress a relationship
to a point where two people toxically come together
based on statistics or based on some fallacy of results
that they think is guaranteed,
when in reality I don't think we usually get
very good results without the nuanced of our humanity
and our relationships involved in that.
So take that for what it is, we would love your comments.
If you have different ideas on AI,
you have a different perspective, feel free to share it.
This is the idea of negotiations
and the idea of debate and dialogue.
It doesn't have to be as unhealthy as the political debates
that we see as our modern examples.
We don't have to be toxic,
but we can learn from each other.
I mean, you can come in and learn
from somebody else's alternative paradigm
that's the opposite of yours.
That's one of the greatest strengths of leadership
that I'm still working on developing.
Just so happens that Michael and I
happen to be on the same point
on almost everything we discussed today.
So Michael, it was an absolute honor to have you on the show.
If people want to get in touch with you,
I got in touch with you through LinkedIn, my automation did,
and I took over from there and we caught up.
But where do you want people to reach out to you?
Yeah, so people can absolutely reach out to me on LinkedIn
if they want.
They can also reach out to me at our company webs
or a company email, macrohead at protonmail.com.
And then we also have a Twitter account,
macrohead, M-A-C-R-O-H-I-N-T.
And yeah, those are the main ways
you can reach out to me pretty directly.
Awesome.
So we have this information on the show notes
in the landing page.
For those of you who are listening later,
you can go and check that out too.
Get in contact with Michael.
And if you have a vision to share,
then absolutely consider applying,
coming to guest on Vision Pros Live
and let's get your vision out to the world.
Everybody have a fantastic weekend
and we'll see you on the next show.
Bye.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent.