I was in Phoenix last week to speak with the Genius Network youth group. Room full of young entrepreneurs, most of them between 18 and 25.
I opened with a sentence I wish somebody had walked into my life and said when I was their age:
You can just do things.
It’s a meme those kids have all heard. Most haven’t actually lived it yet. You don’t need permission. You don’t need a credential. There is no committee reviewing your application.
Most people spend their twenties, even their thirties, waiting for someone to tap them on the shoulder to authorize them. But the tap never comes. As Seth Godin likes to say, pick yourself.
Because…you can just do things.
As you can probably imagine, the date was circled on my calendar, and I was stoked to spend some time with the group. I wanted to share what I would want to know, if I was a 22-year-old entrepreneur today.
Looking back on the discussion, I realized these are things every visionary entrepreneur of any age should know today. So…let’s go.
Before we dig in, something you should know…
These are not six immutable laws. In fact, they’re not even rules, because rules are a bad premise for any entrepreneur. If entrepreneurs followed rules, there would be no Airbnb, Robinhood, Uber, SpaceX, Tesla, or Amazon. (Or iPhones, streaming music, and the cheesy gordita crunch.) The real work of an entrepreneur is finding the places where the rules were never actually laws, just habits that hardened, or premises that expired.
So, here’s what I gave them instead. Six truths that I paid dearly to discover.
- Don’t apologize for your weirdness — weaponize it
The greatest thing a business can be is…different. As an entrepreneur, your greatest superpower is your difference.
And every system you’ve been in for the last fifteen years has been quietly sanding it off you. School, the corporate world, and the “rules” all reward conformity. By 22, most people have spent a decade learning to apologize for the exact thing that would have made them irreplaceable.
Funny story: Two universities have offered me honorary degrees. I rejected their offers as quickly and graciously as I could. As I told them, my whole brand comes from being a high school dropout turned millionaire. I wear that shit like a badge of honor! 🤣
Look at anyone who built anything that mattered. Their weirdness wasn’t a bug they overcame on the way to success. It was the thing. It’s always the thing.
Some of the coolest success stories I advise with are whiz kid entrepreneurs under 30. Some have valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars; a couple are on the path toward unicorn status. Not one of them is normal.
Because the market doesn’t pay for normal. Normal is abundant and free. It pays for the thing only you would have thought of, and you only think of it because you’re wired strange.
Stop sanding off your weirdness. Shout it from the rooftops.
- All true forms of prosperity are infinite
Somebody probably taught you there’s a fixed amount of good in the world — that for you to get some, another person has to go without. They believed it. They probably still do. Look closely at their life and you can see exactly what that belief cost them.
But nobody has ever run out of love by loving. Nobody’s been shorted a hug because someone else got one first. And money works the same way, which is the part that breaks people’s brains, because they’ve been trained since birth to see it as the one finite thing in a universe of infinite ones.
It isn’t. Money is a scorecard for value created, and value has no ceiling.
Stop competing over a slice of the pie. Go bake another one.
- True prosperity is created only two ways
You add value. Or you solve a problem.
That’s the whole list. Everything else — trading, speculating, arbitrage, suing people, lobbying — just slides prosperity from one pile to another pile. Fortunes get made doing that, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But nothing new enters the world.
This is the most clarifying filter I know, and it takes four seconds to run. Whatever you’re building, whatever you’re about to spend two years on: Which one is it? Am I adding value, or am I solving a problem? (Or even better, both.)
If the honest answer is neither, you don’t have a business. You have an activity.
- Price and value are never about competition
The day you set your price by checking what a competitor charges, you’ve made a stranger’s self-worth your business model.
You have no idea what’s happening inside that person. Maybe they’re terrified. Maybe they’re in a fire sale. Maybe they hate themselves a little. And you just appointed them head of your pricing department.
Price comes from one place: the value of the outcome to the person paying.
I don’t charge by the hour. When I consult with a company, I take advisor shares or bonuses based on hitting benchmarks, because I’d rather be paid for the outcome I help create than for the minutes I was in the room.
Here’s the part almost no one gets: underpricing almost never comes from market analysis. It comes from worthiness issues. When you don’t believe you create real value, you’ll underprice, overdeliver, dodge the sales conversation, and then congratulate yourself on being ethical about it.
Cheap isn’t a strategy. It’s a confession.
- Decide how you’ll use the super weapon
You possess the most powerful business weapon ever invented, or the most powerful brain decomposer. Same device.
Smartphone and AI — this is the most leverage any 22-year-old has ever been handed in human history, and it fits in your pocket. It’s also the most sophisticated attention-extraction machine ever aimed at a human nervous system, built by people far smarter than the people trying to help you.
Nobody is stopping you from either one. There’s no adult coming.
The tool has no opinion about which you are. It isn’t rooting for you and it isn’t out to get you. It just amplifies. Whatever you bring to it, you get more of.
So decide. Out loud, on purpose, this week — because not deciding is also a decision, and the machine is very happy to make it for you.
One clause protects all of it: let them do your work. Never let them do your thinking.
The day AI thinks for you, you become the commodity. And commodities compete on price. You already know how that ends.
- Don’t over-index on grownup advice
This is the one I most wanted them to hear, and it costs me something to say it.
Use us. Take the experience. The parts that transfer to now and the parts that transfer to the future. But get suspicious real fast if we start to explain why your goal won’t work.
I can show you how to bring a convention hall of thousands to their feet, write a book that dents the Universe, and share how I make $250k in twenty minutes.
I can also tell you what it costs to hire the wrong person, what happens when the money runs out, and what it feels like to be completely certain and completely wrong at the same time.
That’s all worth your afternoon.
But understand what you’re getting. Everything my grownup friends and I know, we learned in a world that no longer exists. Half of what we mastered was elaborate workarounds for problems you will never have in your life. If you ever need to know how to unjam a fax machine, I’m your guy. But you’re never going to need to know how to unjam a fax machine. Here’s what you should know…
You’re too dumb to know why things won’t work.
And hold on to that with every fiber of your being! Everybody calls that inexperience. It’s the most valuable asset you own. And every well-meaning adult around you is going to try to take it from you. For your own good. Because we’re too dumb to know why it actually could work.
So when one of us tells you that something won’t work, ask us one question:
Is that a law of physics, or is that just a scar?
I’m not in the business of telling young people what’s possible, because I don’t know. I’ve got decades of evidence about what didn’t work and most of it expired while I was busy being proud of it. The best day I get from here is the one where somebody from that room in Phoenix does the thing I said couldn’t be done.
So study these six truths and let them inform you. But always question the premise. And remember this — whether you’re a visionary entrepreneur of 22 or 82…
You can just do things.
Peace,
– RG
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