Raad: Recent Episodes
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A Conversation with Bryan Pham for the Asian Hustle Network podcast
Bryan: At what point did you realize that you had product market fit and how did you
advertise this product?
Raad: It started out with my co founder and I knocking door to door with a square
reader and going on Yelp. We started charging people $300 to join the platform and
promising them clients, even though we had no ideahow we would get any. Then, we
realized that actually getting lawyers to pay for your services is a harder problem
to solve for.
So it started off as this SaaS subscription model and we allowed lawyers to upload
their real time availability. It was similar to a Zocdoc for lawyers where people with
clients can go in, click a slot, get a consultation, get the lead and they would pay us
in exchange for that. That wasn't really good at product market fit, It wasn't
sustainable. We were going after so many different practice areas from divorce
lawyers, to personal injury lawyers and we were spread too thin. Eventually we
focused around startups and small businesses.
We thought that we had product market fit at that time, but it really wasn't. Yet, it was
enough for us to get the attention of 500 startups because we were growing. We were
doing a few thousand dollars in revenue a month and it was picking up.
In terms of social network and how we marketed, I utilized Quora which is a Q&A
site to filter by all the legal questions that people were asking. I cracked open my
old law school textbooks and began answering hundreds and thousands of them for
free and I would link Lawtrades at the bottom for people to check it out. It resulted
in a lot of people visiting the website. I would answer questions like should I
incorporate as an LLC or a C Corp? I must have answered that in 50 different ways
on the site, but it eventually drove some traffic back to the main homepage.
What's cool about Quora is it also picks up with SEO. So if its a really
popular question, people can type it on Google and then Quora will usually be the
first answer there. So not only do you get Quora's traffic, you get Google SEO traffic
as well. That jump started a lot of our early growth and a lot of our early users.
Bryan: I know that you initially mentioned that you thought you had a product market
fit, but what was a real Pivot that caused the product market fit?
Raad: It's tricky because you can grow your company, get paying customers and just
assume that you have product market fit. Fundamentally, if your underlying unit
economics is not sustainable and your customers aren't constantly coming back to the
platformusing it more and more, it becomes really hard and expensive to grow your
product. You can be sort of tricked into thinking that you have product market fit,
which is what happened to us.
We were selling to startups and small businesses and eventually got into 500 startups,
which invested around 125K at the time. Then, we eventually raised a seed round
shortly after doing demo, which resulted in raising a little over 3 million dollars. It
was led by a big VC fund, Draper Associates. At that point, we switched away from
just posting on Quora because it wasn't scalable to continue running more ads on Google and Adwords.
At a certain point, we were spending close to 100 grand a month on Google Ads.
We were acquiring lots of customers and focused on growing the top line revenue in
the business, even though we were actually losing a good amount of money.
The problem with the early stage startup small business segmen, is the vast majority of
them go out of business within the first year.
If you think about when you're starting a company, the last thing you want to spend a
lot of money on frequently is a lawyer. You're trying to hire for engineering, you're
trying to market and spend money on a customer acquisition. When you're building a
marketplace start up, if your demand side usage isn't predictable and recurring, then
that doesn't provide a lot of incentive for your supply side to stay on board.
So at this time we were losing lots of cash, but we're growing top line revenue. We
were doing anywhere from 100 to 250k in monthly top line gross revenue. We knew we
were going to raise a series A and we were going to figure out this losing of money
thing later on. What ended up happening is we failed to raise our series A. At the
time, we didn't know why, but then we realized that there was a competitor that came
out that took our idea and raised around 70 million dollars. It just so happened that he
was a famous founder named Justin Kan who launched his company called
Atrium. He raised from every single VC that we spoke with and we realized why
everybody stopped answering our calls. Justin had close to a billion dollar exit doing a
legal tech company, so why would you trust a bunch of nobodies from Queens to be
able to compete with him?
This goes into the second phase of it, we were forced to get profitable. At that time, it
was a travesty me and my co founder stopped taking salaries. We laid off 80% of our
team, and we just had to get profitable.At this point we were all in on Lawtrades,
failure wasn't an option.
It was a blessing in disguise because it forced us to make this pivot into selling to our
true product market fit, which is legal departments in bigger companies. We now
work with companies like DoorDash, Pinterest, Opendoor and Angelist. We sell to the
general counsels within those companies who have a daily legal need. It went from
startups that might have an annual or quarterly legal need, to companies that use this
every single hour because their legal teams are small, but their companies are growing
and scaling.
It seemed we were doomed for failure, but it all made sense. We rebuilt the product
but we used pieces of it that worked for the small business side and tweaked it for
more longer term enterprise level engagement. Finally it all clicked and our LTVs
went from $1,000 to, basically close to a million dollars. We attracted an even better
supply and the revenue was predictable. Then we kept getting more customers
which attracted more supply and allowed us to become cash flow positive based off
that pivot.
Atrium and another competitor then ended up going out of business and we survived.
A a couple of weeks ago, we raised our Series A.
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Listen now | A conversation with Kamrul Khan for the Bengalis of New York podcast
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Listen now | A Conversation with EJ Lawless for the HR Tech GTM podcast
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At the end of 2019, Lawtrades’s bank balance was down to $20k.
People were getting value from our platform, but we were struggling to convert that value into a healthy balance sheet. Investors were wary of our niche after Atrium shut down, so we had little choice but to go into survival mode—cutting 80% of our staff, and even, at one point, putting expenses on personal credit cards.
Most companies in our position would have gone knocking on VCs’ doors, looking for capital to bridge the gap to profitability.
But we felt we could preserve our equity, stay resourceful, and elbow-grease our way across the chasm.
First, we pivoted, shifting focus from small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) to hypergrowth tech startups. That brought its own slew of challenges, and a brush with bankruptcy that we narrowly avoided. But ultimately, we managed to hack our revenue, taking it from $70k/mo to $700k/mo.
Here’s how we did it, step by step, and the lessons we learned along the way.
Step 1: Fired 94% of our customers
In the beginning, Lawtrades tried to serve every type of client. Mostly, this meant SMBs who couldn’t afford full-time legal teams. Unfortunately, it also meant:
High churn. SMBs generally needed one-off legal help, meaning limited repeat business.
High customer acquisition cost. The less repeat business we generated, the more prospects we had to nurture, hiking our customer acquisition cost.
High competition. Without a clearly defined niche, we were competing on more fronts than we could afford.
Taking a cue from Peter Thiel, we realized that competition was for losers, and that the only way forward was through our most profitable customer segment: hypergrowth tech companies, often pre-IPO, whose general counsels (GCs) needed ongoing support. We fired everyone who didn’t fit that niche, and quickly became a go-to tool for companies like Cruise and DoorDash.
Lesson #1: Riches are in niches.
Step 2: Built a community
Having identified our niche, we naturally started learning a lot about it. What problems did GCs commonly face? How did they solve them? What trends were impacting the space, and how could legal teams stay ahead of them?
To collect our insights, we created a Substack newsletter, Forward GC. Over time, this led to:
Loyal customers. Customers learned to think of us not just as a marketplace platform, but as thought leaders in the niche.
More referrals. By solving one problem very well on a repeatable basis, we earned endorsements from prominent brands like DoorDash.
Lower customer acquisition cost. Word-of-mouth marketing is highly cost-effective—especially when it brings in repeat customers.
Lesson #2: As Paul Graham said, “It’s better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.”
Step 3: Realized we had a cashflow problem
The one great thing about serving SMBs was that they paid quickly. Our newer, larger customers often worked on 30-, 60-, even 90-day billing cycles. Given that we pay our lawyers every two weeks—Lawtrades is fundamentally about economic empowerment on the supply side—that meant our outflow outpaced our income.
The more hypergrowth customers we attracted, the more we grew—and the faster we lost cash. This is where we got down to $20k, where my co-founder and I paused our salaries, and we where had to go into survival mode.
Lesson #3: Don’t grow broke. It’s not always within your control, but avoid it if you possibly can.
Step 4: Tried everything to improve our cashflow
Desperate times called for desperate measures:
Working with shady lenders, some of whom wanted customers to pay them directly—both inconvenient and suspicious.
Quick business loans with outrageous interest rates, in some cases, as much as 10-20%—near-impossible to justify.
Putting expenses on personal credit cards, specifically mine, which prompted some (very) angry words with Amex.
Each of these steps bought us some time, but never sustainably. We couldn’t keep borrowing badly, and Amex threatened to shut down my account
Again, this is where a lot of companies would turn to VC. But we simply believed we didn’t have to—we had legitimate receivables, it was just that they were taking a long time to come in on companies’ billing cycles. Shouldn’t there be a way to leverage those receivables to get capital that would let us pay our supply side, and make it to our next growth stage?
Just in the nick of time, we learned about a new debt option that let us do exactly that.
Lesson #4: Before you default to VC, consider new debt options. As a founder, the most valuable optionality you have is the equity you haven’t sold, the dilution you haven’t taken.
Step 5: Finally fixed cashflow
By a stroke of luck, we learned about a company that provides upfront capital based on receivables. After a few conversations, Capchase agreed to take a chance on us, freeing us up to:
Pay marketplace users without waiting 30+ days. Lawyers on our platform got paid quickly for the work they did, without having to wait out long billing cycles.
10x our revenue by using debt to acquire our next cohort of customers. With more cash on hand to spend on customer acquisition, receivables continued to grow. More receivables unlocked more debt, which allowed us to acquire more customers. And so on.
Revisit fundraising with a much higher valuation. Had we jumped at VC when times were tough, we probably could have raised at a $30-$40M valuation. But because we waited, we were able to revisit fundraising with an $80M valuation, ultimately raising $6M, diluting less than 10% equity.
By this point, VC was a way to diversify our revenue streams, thereby de-risking our CapChase credit line.
Lesson #5: Use VC for Research & Development—innovation—not as a Sales & Marketing or General & Administrative holdover.
The level of effort and maneuvering it’s taken to turn our growth from a liability into an asset has been incredibly illuminating. For startups, it’s not as simple as finding customers or even finding the right customers. There’s an enormous level of nuance even within those objectives.
We are often given the advice that “debt is bad.” We’re told to avoid it at all costs. But with the right partners and plan in place, debt is a powerful mechanism to grow without giving up equity. In our case, we had customers coming in and expenses under control—it was a cashflow problem. And debt solved it.
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Listen now | A conversation with EJ Lawless for the HR Tech GTM Podcast
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Listen now | A Conversation with EJ Lawless for the HR Tech GTM podcast
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Listen now | I’m definitely reading a lot more on philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, spirituality- things within the realm of ego and consciousness. Such as how your emotions work, and how you can observe them. I got into meditation over the last 2 or 3 years.
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Listen now | A conversation with Kamrul Khan for the Bengalis of New York podcast
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Listen now | Kamrul Obviously you're Bangladeshi, but do you find yourself to be very in touch with your "Bengali-ness" for lack of a better word that you're close with your family in Bangladesh and things like that? Raad Yes and no. I was born here in the U.S. and then I went back when I was really young for a year when I was one or two years old.
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Listen now | A conversation with Kamrul Khan for the Bengalis of New York podcast
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Listen now | A conversation with Kamrul Khan for the Bengalis of New York podcast
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Listen now | I think after I lost them it recalibrated what I was doing and why I was doing it and how insanely limited our time here on Earth is, and how ephemeral is is. All your accumulation and ideas can be gone just like that. After 5,000 years I don’t think anyone is going to remember me or you.
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Listen now | A conversation with Kamrul Khan for the Bengalis of New York podcast
Subscribe at raad.substack.com
Listen now | A conversation with Kamrul Khan for the Bengalis of New York podcast
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Listen now | Key Takeaways: Yes, I’ve never held a steady job...spoiler: it turned out OK. The internet is possibly the best wealth creation tool, ever I never grew up craving appreciation from others Our time here is insanely limited- waste it wisely I’m at peak creativity when I’m alone
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After jumping out of an airplane 13,000 feet high and falling back down to earth at 120 mph, my friends started asking me how they can get over their fears.
Like the fear of quitting their job and pursuing their startup full-time.
They want me to say something to make their anxiety disappear, but my answer disappoints most people.
Instead of ignoring our fears, we should pay closer attention to them. There's good reason to notice their patterns.
We need to feel our relationship to it, see how it works when it does and why it doesn't when it doesn't.
Only then can we start the process of reverse-engineering, dissecting, and observing it to better understand how to leverage this emotion to improve our lives.
It might just mean you need to look before you leap.
Because when you crack it open, and look deeper into what's inside them, you'll discover that you don't actually fear the unknown.
It's impossible to fear something that you don't know.
So what you actually fear is losing what you do know.
And what is learning but sacrificing the things you used to believe and the ways you used to think, and replacing those with new truths.
Fear points to an area where you have not yet grown, where you need to develop, and be transformed to change.
So don't just tell yourself to get over a fear or ignore it.
Know that whatever scares you, you need to go do that.
It’s the only way it won't scare you anymore.
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Humans haven’t evolved to be happy.
Here’s how I know:
See if you can pay attention to something for the next 30 seconds.
Like your breath.
The sound of the trees or air conditioner if you’re inside.
Try reading a book without getting distracted by thought.
You’ll probably find that you can’t do it.
This is super fascinating.
We’re thinking without knowing that we’re thinking.
That puts our wellbeing at the mercy of whatever thoughts arise.
Our minds become an endless loop of hopes, fears, fantasies, and opinions.
All the unhappiness in your life starts here.
Meditation has the ability to break this spell and actually connect with the present moment.
Like how too many carbs lead to a bloated body, too many thoughts lead to a bloated mind.
Meditation is simply fasting for the mind.
But as you probably noticed, it doesn’t come naturally.
And just like any important skill, it grows with perseverance, patience, and training.
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VC's love to invest money in founders who don't need it.
Universities love giving scholarships to students who don't need their help.
People follow people on social media who won't give them the time of day.
It's a strange but universal human behavior.
If you set up your startup like you don't need the funding, investors are happier to buy your equity.
People who try too hard are annoying.
People who try too hard to be attractive are repulsive.
People who chase happiness are miserable.
When founders try too hard to raise money, investors can sense that desperation and get turned off.
When founders are doing a startup to make dreams come true for others, being giving instead of stingy, and 100% focused on creating value, it triggers this human condition:
We want to be generous to those who are generous.
Raising money is a skill like any other.
Learn it and practice it as you would anything else.
Set up your startup like you don't need the money, and it'll probably come your way.
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No matter how much we try to suppress it, death is an indisputable part of life.
Yet we still choose to maintain a state of denial to avoid getting up close and personal with it.
This leads us to live a life in a default state of unconsciousness.
One that’s filled with procrastination, unhappiness, petty drama with family members, and generally using up time to do stuff that’s not important, not fun, and not useful to anyone including yourself.
So why does this topic matter to me?
This past year, I lost my mother, a close friend around my age, and an uncle from Greece.
Looking for answers, it led me to the concept of momento mori—remember you must die, so I want to talk about how this simple idea changed the trajectory of my life.
It was just another day for them.
They woke up, got dressed, nothing unusual to indicate that they would never see, touch, hear, or taste ever again.
No clue that it would be their last day on earth.
Contemplating their sudden disappearance and witnessing their burials, metastasized through my body like cancer.
But before I could even begin to understand death—religion and society came rushing in to explain this mystery.
And here’s 3 ways they minimize it:
First is time. We assume that death is not for a long time. It’ll hit us when we’re 80 or 90 years old and by that time we’ll be too dumb and old to care. So we push thinking of death to some later time so we’re not bothering by it right now.
Second, is through our afterlife beliefs—heaven, hell, rebirth. The idea that this life is just a transition into something better and you’re going to get everything you want after you die, so its serves its purpose of getting death out of sight and out of mind.
The third tactic is by society always keeping our minds perpetually distracted by the trivialities of life— shopping in the mall, spending family time, watching sports, gossiping, drinking alcohol etc…
And I’ll be the first to admit that it actually makes sense to accept that death is just an illusion because it pays high emotional dividends to know that everyone’s going to be reunited in a few years.
But what is the cost of thinking this way?
Ultimately, running away from death, takes all of our time and energy—and that’s how we spend most of our existence.
We live it in fear, rather than embracing its ephemeral beauty.
You can turn away from it, but you can’t push it away.
Death will always be with you.
And there are no such things as just another day.
My mom was attending a high school reunion, Fahim was returning from a run, and my uncle was playing with his kids.
Everyday is an anything-can-happen type of day.
And there is not a single day or hour or second so boring that it can’t play host to death.
Everyday is doomsday and the best day of your life at the same time.
And our extremely limited time makes it really important that we don’t spend it being miserable.
Time is limited and we can’t pretend like it’s not.
How would you look at the world if you knew you couldn’t see tomorrow?
What would you eat if you couldn’t eat another meal ever again?
One day, it’ll actually be your last time.
Because every breath you take is one less breath you’ll have left.
So visit your favorite cities.
Listen to your favorite songs.
Eat at your favorite restaurants.
Hug your favorite people.
Contemplate what it means to be alive and appreciate each moment fully.
And when death comes, you’ll treat it with indifference.
Because you’ve been preparing for it all along.
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Unhappiness is when you worry about not having something.
Depression is realizing you’ll never have it.
And freedom is understanding you never needed it in the first place.
Humans are comprised of emotion and intellect, so it’s easy to think you need to change something when you’re unhappy.
Society always pushes us outward, never inward, because that benefits them.
Unhappy people are shaped by the conditions of their environment.
They have no shock absorption.
Every bump in the road feels like a boulder.
Their fight or flight response gets triggered by things that should blow over like a breeze.
The Doordash arrives late.
The person not wearing a mask.
You missed your revenue targets.
The easy thing to do is put up resistance, but it’s way harder to relax into the moment.
Happy people cultivate indifference to things outside of their control.
Instead of turning their discernment to the outside world from the ego, they direct it inward against it.
Since starting Lawtrades I’ve lived below the poverty line and became wealthy more times than I can remember.
This time last year, me and my co founder reduced our salaries to $35k/yr and let go of 70% of our employees the year before.
I should’ve been angry but I wasn’t.
I wasn’t concerned with success because it never occurred to me that success was even possible.
I was just exhilarated from experiencing my first taste of freedom.
You can’t win by fighting.
The very thing that fights, that resists, is the thing standing in the way of your happiness.
Put another way, the degree to which you resist is directly proportional to your suffering.
I am perfectly happy with everything as it is.
I am happy with misery, poverty, and death.
I am also happy with wealth and psychological fulfillment.
I eat when I’m hungry, sleep when I’m tired.
I don’t take sides.
I have no preferred outcome.
I get to eat at good restaurants.
And I haven’t accidentally clicked on a banner ad in 10 years.
If I lose it all tomorrow, I’ll be fine.
Because sometimes, not wanting something is as good as having it.
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Af-flu-en-za n.
1 . The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses.
2 . An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the American Dream.
3 . An unsustainable addiction to economic growth.
Instead of our watches telling us what time is, it should tell us how much time we have left.
When we look at our lives as vast and endless, we just go with the flow without ever stopping to think -- why are we doing what we're doing?
Most people don't know. And proceed through their daily existence like programmed robots, bound by habits and tethered to their emotions.
Gradudate high school, then college, get your post-grad degree and then straight into the workforce. Get married, have a kid, borrow money, buy a house, fill it with crap, have another kid, borrow more money, get a bigger house, add more crap.
It’s completely insane, and I distinctively remember going up on stage to get my law degree while simultaneously thinking about the horrible regret I might have on my death bed, feeling like I just spent my life pursuing what someone said I should want, instead of what I actually wanted.
Up until starting my company, I dressed for other people, spoke and behaved for other people, spent the minutes, hours and days of my life for other people , and there was never anything left for me.
What society wants for you is not always what's good for you.
There's a big difference between truth and societal consensus.
For example, the societal consensus is "Money can't buy you happiness", but it's not a truth because look at all the people trying to make money. Having a higher income does improve a persons day-to-day well being by remove a lot of sources of unhappiness and putting you in more control.
That's just one of the many lies society tells you.
Like, when did we all arrive to the conclusion that the right thing to do is to have everyone just go and spend their lives working for someone else.
Look, my point is whenever you realize what you really want and admit it, you then you need to pursue it.
If you want to be rich, be prepared to take on a lot of responsibilities.
If you want freedom, own a business and delegate ruthlessly.
If you want to be famous, let other people make more money, while you take the limelight.
But whatever you choose, brace yourself, because society is always going to tell you you're wrong, especially when you transgress from the herd.
That's why it's so hard.
Many people hear the ringing alarm in life.
The call to wake up.
But what we're programmed to do is hit the snooze button and go back to sleep.
That's why you need to know in advance, why you're doing what you're doing and break through the illusion that you have time.
To finally begin living.
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Hard work is b**t and if it feels like you’re working hard, you’re probably not interested in the thing you’re working on.
After starting Lawtrades, it took 3 years to cross our first million in sales.
This year, we got there in 2 months.
I reflected back to see what changed.
Did I work harder?
Finally achieve 10,000 hours of mastery?
Eat 1 meal a day?
No.
I actually worked less hours.
Scheduled less meetings.
Turned off every notification on my phone.
And spent more time reading and thinking than ever before in my life.
People mistakenly equate hard work with results.
It’s why society is full of people who commit to “hard work” and still see no impact.
What they don’t realize is hard work is largely a reaction of fear and anxiety.
Here’s how it works:
You set out something you really want.
Then you introduce an intermediary step, in the way of you and that desire.
Now hard work and effort just became it’s own new game.
You start competing to work harder than others.
You know, that Mark Cuban quote:
Work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it all away from you.
So you buy into this idea that some powers at be will grant you what you want because you took some step.
But what actually happens?
Well, the thing you were actually seeking— just got replaced by the prescription of hard work.
To really appreciate this delusion, we must understand it from a sub-conscious level.
When you don’t get to where you want to be, your mind asks you—what went wrong?
So you try to justify it by telling your Self that you didn’t work hard enough.
So you go back to your hard work checklist and the cycle begins itself again.
So you might be thinking, am I trying to convince you that if you work less hard then you’ll be successful?
No, the opposite isn’t true either.
Make no mistake—startups are the olympics of business.
It’s really f*g hard to turn nothing into a multi-billion public company.
But what I’m saying is people who say they work 80-100 hour work weeks, take no vacations, sleep under their desks—are usually just status signaling because the world loves celebrating people that put in their “blood, sweat, and tears.”
While those that “just” work 40 hours and create things when they feel inspired, and take long breaks, yet achieve the same level of success, are labeled by society as just getting lucky.
From an outsider looking in, what looks like hard work to you, is really just play for me.
I enjoy creative work, so anything that’s not creative, I’ll outsource it to someone else.
I want to be the guy that worked the least hardest and gotten everything I wanted.
Those that put in half the time and got 10x the results.
You can practice the same lesson 1,000 times, and still be passed by someone who only practiced it 10 times, but their judgement was better.
You see, people don’t get burned out from work, they get burned out from work they don’t want to do, which by definition, is called suffering.
That’s why it’s important to team up with the right people when first starting out.
I’m naturally better at marketing and product than sales and operations—so I let my co founder handle the latter, who is naturally better at that stuff than me.
Companies don’t die when they run out of cash—I’ve experienced that numerous of times—they die when the team run out of energy.
Getting wealthy and not being told what to do was the only thing I truly wanted growing up.
So I naturally outperformed everyone else I knew.
How badly you want something supersedes the raw number of hours you put in.
The employees at the billion dollar company aren’t working harder than the million dollar company.
So yes, I think Malcom Gladwell was wrong.
You don’t need 10,000 hours for greatness.
You’re better off running 10,000 experiments because that’s what it takes to truly understand why you aren’t where you want to be.
Find the thing keeping you from advancing in that direction and destroy it.
The world is full of people working so hard and achieving so little.
Our drive for creativity and creation is our birthright.
And hard work is only necessary when you’re doing a lot of what you don’t want to do.
Stop chasing aimless goals and go out in to the world and do whatever you want; create, rebel, paint, learn guitar, jump out of airplanes, tend to your vegetable garden, whatever.
Anything but hard work.
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Core values guide me to finding the right people to get into relationships with.
Whether that’s great coworkers, lovers, friends, or investors—when my values line up with theirs, I know I’m probably going to be around them for the rest of my life.
But when they don’t match, I’m usually fighting with them about one thing or another, and generally putting in more effort to maintain the relationship.
So here’s my 3 core values.
Truth
I believe in an openness to the truth and being yourself, no matter the consequences or where that road will lead.
This allows you reason independently from the ground up and resist the pressure to conform.
Within a social setting, I don’t want to be around anyone where I have to question my actions before and after I do them.
Thoughts like: “I should have acted this way; I should not have acted that way; I should have said this”—are all red flags.
I have no regrets, no apologies—whatever I am doing is automatic and authentic.
Plus, who really cares what I say anyway? So might as well speak my mind.
Self-awareness
Are you living like the type of person you claim to be?
For the self-aware, reality is your best feedback.
This provides you with the right frame of mind to make better decisions.
You’re open, easy, and in tune with it all, rather than just stuck in your own head.
What you are aware of puts you in control; what you are not aware of is in control of you.
Action bias
I like to be around scrappy people that iterate quickly.
Always on the move.
No ones coming to save you and hand you a brighter future.
So if you want to do it, just do it.
There’s one goal: and it’s to keep plowing ahead further.
Leaving behind all fear, doubt, mediocrity, pettiness, and other chains that bind us.
Listen to the voice in your head that’s telling you do things a certain way, different from everyone else.
Then you get to be you.
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Listen now (55 sec) | It's about operating within the system without being controlled by it.
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