TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: How To Boost Your Enterprise With a START
Date: 09/27/24 Length: 00:37:45
Daniel Lapin 0:00
Welcome each and every one of you of the community of Happy Warriors, welcome to the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show where I your rabbi reveals how the world really works. Yes, each and every one of you, Happy Warriors, you are a welcome part of our community. Happy, yeah, Happy Warriors. Happy, well, yeah, because you are someone who has come to understand that happiness is not a reaction, it is a decision. You don't need outside factors to make you happy. You have decided that your default condition for happiness and success is a reasoned, determined, deliberate decision to be happy, and that's wonderful for everyone in your orbit, at home and at work and socially, because it's an enormous blessing to be with a happy person. And you're also a warrior, not just a happy go lucky person, but you're a Happy Warrior, because you understand that joyful success in life comes from struggling against the natural resistance that in the nature of the world tends to obstruct and resist every step you make in the direction of self improvement. I call it spiritual gravity. You try to get airborne, and it tries to keep you earthbound in every effort you make to improve any one or all of your five F's, it throws up obstacles and temptations. But as a Happy Warrior, you know that every single victory you win, no matter how small, brings other victories in its wake. And so that's why we all are not just warriors and not just happy go lucky as but we are happy warriors, and one of the things that happy warriors realize is that our ability to progress, our success and our happiness depends upon our ability to impose our own limits on our own freedom. That's right, being able to step off the slippery slide, that seductive right of freedom and imposing upon ourselves restraints and restrictions and regulations, and I'll speak a bit more about those soon. That is the direction in which happiness and success lie, because so many people confuse license with freedom. You know licentiousness is doing whatever your feelings drag you towards.
Daniel Lapin 2:51
Freedom is what you have when you are capable of imposing limits and restraints upon your feelings and upon your emotions and where that is so particularly important is when you are being carried, along by an avalanche of emotions. Coming to trust our emotions is a very dangerous thing. And every Happy Warrior realizes that emotions are wonderful. We should all have emotions, and we should feel wonderful emotions. We should feel emotions like love and appreciation and gratitude, but we should not indulge in emotions like anger and jealousy. Emotions are very real, no question about it, but we don't regulate our lives on the basis of our emotions. We impose limits and restraints and controls and restrictions, rather than just acting on our emotions and doing whatever we feel like. And one of the things I'd love you to do, whether you feel like it or not, is to go ahead and subscribe and make sure you are part of the Happy Warrior community, so you will be able to have the incredible pleasure of advising and helping and guiding others who are on the journey, and perhaps not as far as you and perhaps not as successful as you, and in turn, being helped and guided and encouraged and inspired by those who might be a little further down the journey of success in your five F's. So make sure that you do join. You can, of course, subscribe to the podcast, and I'd love it if you do that, obviously, and you can, of course, become a member of the Happy Warrior community. And as usual, to express my appreciation for those of you who take the trouble to do that, I have, as always, a special, unique podcast program especially for you. You, and you will get the key to that on the Happy Warrior website as soon as you are a member. And one of the things we're going to take a look at there is two amazingly popular notions that don't exist, and the impact of realizing this on your life, can explain all of that, but at least now for today, what we're dealing with is, well, it's that little button, so little red button to the right of my steering wheel in my car, and in the car I rented while I was visiting Dallas for a number of speeches last week. Well, that car had it as well, and it would only be older cars that have a key and you put the key in and you turn the key, but most new cars, you just step into your car with your car fob in your pocket, and there's this nice red button, and it says start. And that's really what I want to talk about start, because you see, all too often, we know the end, but not the beginning.
Daniel Lapin 6:18
We know the destination, but not the start. Whenever we embark on some kind of a project, we usually have a pretty idea, pretty good idea, of what we're trying to achieve, where we're trying to get to, what the goal is. But do we have clarity with the start? And I want to explain to you today how powerful a tool a start is, and how you can deploy this in your struggle to improve your life by advancing each of your 5f's onwards and upwards. A start is too often ignored. People know what they want, but they don't always formally begin the start again, perhaps indulgently, and if so, you'll forgive me, but I take it back to one of our fascinating enterprises, which was sailing our family across the Pacific on our sailboat. And I can tell you exactly the date we departed, and I remember a number of the people we invited to come to the departure party and to see us off and there on the dock, we had fun for an hour or two before we finally cast off our lines and left Marina del Rey and we steered westwards, but it was a very specific departure. Of course, I knew the destination. The destination was Hawaii. I knew it was going to be about three weeks away, because we cover, you know, something like 100 miles a day on our sailboat and Europe to be in good winds. And of course, at that time of the year, the trade winds were, were good So, and we knew it was 2200 miles to Hawaii. So it's going to be about three weeks, and we knew all that, but we also made a big deal out of the start of the voyage, there was nobody there to greet us when we sailed into the marina in Honolulu. At the end of our trip, there was nobody there to meet us. The departure was an event. The arrival - we didn't know exactly when it could be. It's not as if we could tell people hey meet us on the dock at such and such a time. We had no idea for we knew we might arrive in the middle of the night, although I usually very much avoid trying to enter strange harbors that I don't know in the middle of the night. It's just too difficult to see navigation lights against the bright city lights, and it's just too easy to make a fatal mistake. So at any rate, we stats are much more important than we realize, and generally, when we plan something, we plan it with the destination in mind, with the goal, the ultimate achievement. But we don't spend enough time focusing on the start.
Daniel Lapin 9:36
And so if you don't have the start clear, then very often, a large part of the journey, if not all of it, becomes wasted and never reaches any kind of fulfillment. For instance, there are men who are very focused on trying to meet girls and to date girls. Yeah, but there was no start. What do I mean by a start? A start would be where you formally say to yourself, I want to get married. I'm now going to be focused on getting married, and after I've dated somebody for once or twice. And it's obvious that it doesn't lend itself that this is not a connection that is going to lead to to marriage. I end it. I don't waste anybody's time, because the start of this journey is clear. I'm starting a journey to get married. Most people do it completely wrong. Most people meet somebody, and then maybe they decide to get married, or maybe they don't, but that's the wrong sequence. There's got to be a start first, and then the journey, and then the destination. The destination is marriage. The journey is finding somebody you want to marry, and the start is saying that from now onwards, from this date, I am formally committing myself to get married. I don't know to who yet, but now I'm on the journey that's the right way to do it. And whenever I hear guys telling me I just haven't met the right person yet, my answer is always, first of all, you haven't said about trying to be the right person, and the first step on being the right person is the start. You want to get married. That is the commitment. And you might even put a a time limit on it. I want to be married by the entity, or whatever it is, but most people do that wrong, and it's an unsatisfying and an inadvisable way to go about it. The decision to get married is the start, and then you find the right person, you don't find the person, and then decide to get married. Now this is going to sound a little counterintuitive to many of you, but think about it, and I think there's a very good chance you will decide that, to your shock and amazement, this is absolutely correct. Somebody might decide to go through all the hassle of getting a gun license, and when it comes right down to it, he hasn't yet decided whether he wants to have a gun. And I know more than one person like that, the first thing to do is to decide whether you want to own a firearm. You might need to talk to your spouse and see if your spouse is on board with you owning a firearm. You might think about where and how you're going to store it safely, and then with that start in mind, You've now made a start. Then you go through the hassle of getting a an official, legal permit for it. But why would you go on the journey of getting a permit before you've pressed the start button? People starting a business, people who spend time researching this, how they're going to start the business and and they're going to do all kinds of exciting meetings, but there's no business plan. They've got no idea of where the capital is coming from. There hasn't been a start they're just meandering down the pathway of what they think that starting a business is about. It's really important to understand that very often, the absence of a start button means that there will be no destination. There won't even be a journey. And the analogy of that red start button on my dashboard in my car is a perfect one. Don't press the start button, but meanwhile, look at your roadmap, look at your GPS, read all the details about the things you can see at your destiny. You're going nowhere. If you haven't pressed the start button, you are going absolutely nowhere. That's a very good analogy. Let me try and give you some more examples. One of them, I hope, will talk to your heart and make sense to you. I know somebody. I know a guy who for many, many years, he's a single man, and he or he loves little kids. Whenever he's in a room and a mom comes in with little kids, he goes over and ooze and oz and tickles the baby under the chin. He just loves babies and and he's always said, Oh, he really would like to have his own baby. There's only one problem. He loves babies, but he doesn't love women. Now, it's not that he it's not that what you you first thought of it's not that at all. He's absolutely not that. But he's just, in a way, sort of asexual. It's just not drawn to women in general, and certainly not to any particular woman. There's no start. Button there. He's not going to have babies. That is just absolutely plain and simple and clear, because babies are one of the destinations of forming a relationship with a woman. He likes the destination, but he's never been that excited about the Start button, and so, not surprisingly, he is still alone and still babyless, and nothing is likely to change that. Think about companies. I really I'm not saying there are no exceptions. I'm sure there are, I just can't think of an exception offhand. I'm sure I could. But in general, most successful organizations had a start usually they didn't stumble into something. The Entrepreneurs pressed a start button. There was some specific action on a specific date. That was the start. I want you to think of a start. You know, I gave you one analogy, the car start button, but here's another one. It's a sort of a launching pad and a first stage rocket booster. When you have a proper start to a project, you you're launched. There's something there's something there. It's something that you're able to shoot up out like a rocket booster, ready to go. The start is not an amble onto the journey, but it's a explosive launch into your journey. You know, just think of how your car rumbles when you press that start button, if you're lucky, of course, if you have an electric car, well, I can't help you there
Daniel Lapin 17:02
a wedding, but every couple knows the start of them. Any man, every married couple knows the start of their marriage, right? They'll tell you the date of their wedding. They even celebrated when that date comes around. Every year they celebrate it. It's called an anniversary. And so rather than just a casual thing where they have a date and then they become girlfriend and boyfriend for a couple of years, and then they live together, and then after they may or may not, sort of slide into marriage, but it's just a sort of ambling and stumbling into it that's very different from a wedding date. This is really the start of our relationship. We're not even pretending to be married in any way at all before the date of our wedding, which is still three months away, but that's going to be the start of our lives together. And so a wedding in that fashion constitutes a rocket booster, a launch pad. Absolutely the store, one of the most successful brands out there right now, Amazon, right? Well, Jeff Bezos left a Wall Street job and moved to Seattle in 1994 and he started on his business plan to start a company, and he'll tell you the exact date, in 1994 I don't remember what it was, but he knows, I guarantee it. And he in his garage in Seattle, he worked for a few months, I think. He started in September 1994 I think, and then in 1995, Amazon was launched, and within a few weeks, it had sold $20,000 worth of product. Now, it took a while for it to make a profit, but there was a company 30 years ago. It had a starting date. There was an actual action. He gave up his job. He drove across the country with his wife, I should say, then wife. Unfortunately, he's been better at business than he has at marriage in the five F's. You got to be just as good at family as you are at finance. Jeff Bezos wasn't, but he was good at finance, and he's making a bit of a fool of himself right now on the family front. But anyways, you know, good luck to him. He really has done a lot for us all. They're very few people whose life Amazon hasn't enhanced has helped. Unless you're not a customer of Amazon, then fine. But for anybody who's benefited from Amazon, you can say thank you to Jeff Bezos. Dollars, and that company began with a start button. There was actually a starting point, Google, right? How about Google? Surely, one of the huge success stories of the the internet period, you could say the 21st century, because they started in 1998 I believe, and there was Sergey Brin and Larry Page. And what happened is they they'd spent a couple of years fooling around with the idea of search engines, but then they didn't just stumble into a business. They rented a garage from a woman called Susan Wojcicki, and Susan Wojcicki later on became, I think, a CEO at Google, excuse me, at YouTube, which was subsequently owned by you, by Google, but they paid a $1,700 a month, which back in 98 you know, was money for two students. But they pressed the start button. They weren't fooling around. They were serious. And that's one of the great things about a start. And round about now, you probably thinking to yourself of various enterprises upon which you have embarked in your life, some of which had a start, and perhaps some which didn't, and you might even be finding a correlation between those that succeeded really well and those Well, perhaps a little less well, in terms of a start and things that do well, I again, just want to invite you to make sure that you are benefiting from the full happy warrior experience by being part of the Happy Warrior community. Cost you a few bucks a month, and the benefits are number one, you have access to a vast body of instructional and inspirational material right there on the happy warrior website, just for you and and as of more recently, I'm excited about this. I do two podcasts, the main one, which you're listening to right now, and then another one, which is specially as a tribute and an expression of appreciation and esteem for those of you who made the start, who pressed the start button of becoming happy warriors, and you might even know the date on which you became a happy warrior. If you don't, your membership website will probably tell you, but you get the idea right.
Daniel Lapin 22:39
The idea is that taking a formal step saying, at this point, I am now going to do this. That's the start. That's pressing the start button, and the satisfying rumble you hear as that v8 engine kicks to life. That means you're on the journey you've actually launched, as opposed to just stumbling along through life, try this, try that. But it's not an accident that Amazon began with a start and Google began with a start. Nike began with a start. Was a lot earlier, and Phil Knight will tell you, was January the 25th 1960 1960 what were 60? Gosh, I think 664, I believe it was. And he started the business. He called it at that point. He called it the Blue Ribbon sports company. And he started it with the legendary athletics coach at University of Oregon, Bill Bowerman must have been a remarkable man. And Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman had a formal start to their footwear company, another great company that I admire, Costco, Costco, Sol Price and his son Robert, started the first discount wholesale warehouse in they called it Price Club in those days. And they started on July the 12th, 1976 in San Diego. And two of their executives, Jim Senegal and Jeff Brotman Then on September the 15th, 1983 please note they know the dates, because they didn't just fall into something. They didn't just stagger along the road and say, Oh, look, there's something. And they didn't just stumble into it. No, they made a formal decision to start Costco in Seattle. And Price Club started in 76 in in San Diego, September the 15th, 83 Costco started in Seattle. Specific start buttons. That's when these guys press the button. Do. See having a date when you actually start your marriage or start your business or start your enterprise, or start your diet program or start your exercise program, or whatever it is, you know what it's like. Let me give you one more example. It's like runners starting blocks. Well, if you watch the if you watch really good runners at proper athletic meets, you'll see that they have blocks fixed to the ground, usually nailed into the ground, and they put their feet against it, and they wait for the starter's gun, and then they explosively hurtle off the start, but they've got something to push against. In a way, that's what a start is. When you have an official start, and I call it a launch pad in a first stage rocket booster, that's because you got something to push against, and Newton's laws of motion tell us that for every action there's a reaction, and you've got to push against something in order to be able to make that leap forward. And what do you push against? What is your starter's block? It's your start button. It's having an official starting. And I understand we guys are reluctant to do this, because deep down, we realize that having an official start is kind of a commitment. You know, you tell people, This is my start day,
Daniel Lapin 26:37
you look like a bit of an idiot if you don't actually follow through and do it. And we guys like to have the option of failing. We like to have the option of just dropping out. And so when we use the phrase commitment phobic, we usually mean it in the context of guys who don't want to commit to marriage, but it applies to almost every high potential enterprise in life. Guys who are commitment phobic usually don't get married and they don't build great businesses. And it's not an accident that, with few exceptions, those two often go together. It's not a mistake that the book that is sold more than any other book in the history of the Earth, in the history of printing, the history of publishing, the Bible begins with the words in the beginning. There was a start. There's a reason why children's story books usually begin. Once upon a time, that's the start. Now it's considered somewhat fashionable for books to begin sort of plunging you right into the middle of the story and and then it takes you several pages, if not chapters, to sort of figure out where everything is. And if you like that, you know, God bless you. But stories work best like everything else in life, if there is a start the year. Interestingly enough, this coming Wednesday, the beginning of October, is Rosh Hashanah. It's a Jewish Bible festival called the head of the year. Often gets translated as New Year incorrectly, because it's not a party time. It's not a new year time for, you know, pretty drinks and colored hats. No, it's a serious, solemn time. It is the running blocks. It's the starting blocks for the year. It's great. That's what it is. It's a serious, two day festival where we are starting the year. And I know for sure in my own life, I know that years in which I have practiced and celebrated and solemnized a good and effective Rosh Hashanah celebration, I have a better year, I launch in a in a completely different way. And so, yeah, that's I guess that's partially why it's been on my mind as a topic. And a serious start means you're not fooling around. It means you're being serious, not silly. When Jeff Bezos left his job at a prominent Wall Street firm and had no other job in the offing, and loaded his wife and himself into a car and drove across country to the unknown, the entrepreneurial unknown, he wasn't kidding around. He was serious. It was 30 years ago, and look what he has to show for it now. It's remarkable. So that's another thing that having a start, an official start, does it? It makes you feel serious about it. And you know, whenever. One leaves the Harbor on a on a voyage, even if it's a short one, there's always a little bit of apprehensiveness. And yeah, there's an excitement and getting out on the open water and feeling the wind, but there's also just you feel a little apprehensive, right? Because you're so comfortable in the harbor, you tied up to the dock, you get on and off, and there's a comfortable pub at the top of the dock, and there's a laundry and whatever you need, and you're a bus ride into town. It's really nice being in the harbor. And if you don't make an official start to your journey, as we are leaving at four o'clock in the afternoon on the Fourth of July, and you have people there to celebrate your start because you're making it a commitment. It's all too easy to go out a few miles. See the conditions aren't great. And you say, You know what, let's go back to harbor. We'll try another day, but there's always going to be a reason to not leave the harbor. There's always going to be a reason to give up and go back to the harbor, the Safe Harbor. And so a start means you're serious. You're committed. Come what may, you're pushing ahead. Have you noticed that whenever they start a really important building, they started with setting a cornerstone. They may not even have finished the excavations yet, but they get a Mason in, they get some cement, and they put up a cornerstone with the date on which this building was started. You'll see a particularly in older towns. You'll in the in the older part of town, you'll see lots and lots of buildings that have stones like that, usually near their entrance or on a main corner. And it tells you on this in the state this found this cornerstone was laid, and it gives some of the names of the dignitaries who were there, and maybe the architect and the builder, whatever it was. But again, it's a start. It's an official start to the business, start to the building. I should say, you boost any enterprise with a start. America started on July the fourth, 1776 when the Second Continental Congress adopted and proclaimed the declaration of independence from England, from Great Britain. There was the start, and there was no going back from that. It was very difficult. It was painful. A lot of people lost lives. A lot of people lost their fortunes. A lot of people lost their sacred honor. It was not an easy time, not an easy time at all. And yet, without a start, I question whether it would have happened and whether it would have succeeded. They started it, and there was no going back once they'd issued that Declaration of Independence, even though, in 1776 it took three or four months before it actually got to England, and England became aware of it. But as far as they were concerned, it was already done. And as regards American, excuse me, British Army forces that were on the North American continent, they found out pretty quick. And so yeah, there was another case of where a start helped people take it seriously. And that's what a start does for you. You basically absorb into your soul that you're now on a journey, and there's a starting point and there's a destination, and we've just celebrated the starting point, we're now on the journey, and nothing is going to stop us from reaching the destination. And I suggest to you that if there have been any times where you have not achieved your goal, where there was something you wanted to do but you never quite made it, is it possible that one of the things missing in that venture was a start button? And, yeah. Look, I do understand why we avoid it. Like I said, We men prefer no official start, because it keeps our options open. It starts a commitment. And we men in general, like to keep ourselves free, but we have to remember that achievement is nearly always the result of abandonment of freedom where we're where we surrender our freedom willingly, consensually, voluntarily, and we replace it with commitment. And that's that's true in in almost every enterprise. Is and so that gives us something of an idea of how we can dramatically change the course of our lives. It's all very nice to have a destination. It's very nice to have a vision board where you have pictures of your goals. It's all very nice, but make sure that not only is their destination, but there must also be a start. And the importance of the Start can hardly be exaggerated. It's not spoken about often it's ielusive, in a way. People say, Well, you know what? I'll just start my exercise program tomorrow, and then, you know, they either do or they don't, but a start locks you into the journey and puts you on the road to your destination and to your goal, making it ever more likely that you are actually going to get there and and so, my dear friends, you may if you haven't yet done so, go ahead and make sure you make the start of seriously improving your life by escalating your family, your faith, your friendships, your finances and your family, family, faith, finances, friendships and fitness, your physical fitness,
Daniel Lapin 36:37
all of that. And being a part of the Happy Warrior community - it's almost like having a coach. It sort of keeps you on track, and for that alone, it's worthwhile. You press the start button, you make the decision to become a happy warrior and join the community, and the community then helps you keep on the journey and reaching the destination. And so if, if you are going to be celebrating Rosh Hashanah, if you're going to be celebrating the start of this Hebrew year, then I wish you Shana Tova a good year, which is almost the inevitable consequence of having the start button until next week, I am your rabbi, wishing you a wonderful week of progressing onwards and upwards with your Family, your finances, your friendships, your faith and your fitness. God bless you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
