8-figure lessons from Quantum Mastermind

8-figure lessons from Quantum Mastermind

Topic
Lessons
Summary

A collection of my notes, ideas, and lessons.

The following text is a collection of my notes, ideas, and lessons learned from Sam Ovens throughout my time being a member of Quantum Mastermind (Dec ‘21 - Jan ‘23) prior to it being shut down in January 2023.

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In total:

  • 248 pages.
  • 67,552 words.
  • 385,563 characters.
  • 500+ hours spent learning.

1. Focus

The species that have a focus on fixing errors are the oldest living species. If you have a mindset that it's an eternal cycle of fixing errors you'll go to interesting places.

Say no. To money & opportunities. That is the cost of focus.

If I don’t do distraction, I do focus?

Find distraction. You find focus.

Most of the unlocking things come from focusing on your weaknesses.

Where to focus?

  1. Define your goal: What do you want? What makes you happy?
  2. Eliminate or delegate all things that aren’t ‘x’.
  3. You need time/space to think about these things a lot. Stop being so busy.
  4. You need to protect “white space”.

2. Sleep Hacks

  • Sleep 8-9 hours /night: Go to bed/wake up at the same time.
  • Go to bed early. (people that say they’re not morning people, are people that just go to bed late.
  • Sam sleeps on Japanese futon (straightens your back out – A lot of brain activity is spine alignment)
  • CBD Oil / Chamomile tea
  • Cold room – use bed jet
  • No caffeine after 3 (half-life = 8 hrs)
  • No eating after 7 (body needs time to digest)
  • Sleep in a silent room that’s 65˚F, and pitch black.
  • Use an oura ring to track your sleep.
  • Have a set routine with 2 hours of “wind-down” time.
  • 2h before bed: Ashwagandha, magnesium glycinate/threonate, theanine.
  • No phone/computer in bedroom (only use room for sleep)

3. Productivity Hacks

  • Get a cleaner.
  • Turn off all push notifications on your phone / delete as many apps as possible.
  • Wear the same clothes every day (minimum viable closet).
  • Expansive views of nature.
  • Buy a comfortable chair.
  • Optimize your computer/desk setup
    • Bigger monitors work well (27” LG Ultrafine 5k)
    • Highest spec laptop available.
    • Highest speed internet
    • Find a keyboard and mouse you like.
  • Minimal phone time (less than 30m per day)
  • 20m meditation/day
  • No alcohol (limit as much as possible)

4. How To Get Your Spark Back

  1. You have to notice you lost your spark.
    1. You don't want to go to work.
    2. You want to go home early.
    3. You don't want to get out of bed.
    4. You don't have energy.
    5. When you are at work you are seeking distraction. (ie. seeing what other people are doing).
  2. Start thinking why, what happened?
  3. Sit down and do nothing. Have a pen and a piece of paper, and think what do I want?
    1. Keep writing things down, and what makes you come alive.
    2. Start with things you don't want (I don't want to do this, I don't like that) – what's the pattern/trend?
    3. Think about the opposite of the things you don’t want.
  4. Once you find the thing that's good, how do you get more of it?
  5. Then continue to restructure, reorganize, and re-evaluate your life. It’s a never-ending game.
  • Think back to when you were a kid, what gave you a spark? Stay in that playful childlike, excited, space.
  • Have clearly defined, ambitious goals all the time.
  • Answer these questions:
    • What am I thinking about?
    • What am I feeling?
    • What don’t I like?
      • …I don’t like this
      • …I don’t want to do that
      • …This thing sucks
    • What do I want to do?
  • Go through Pinterest, and click on things I like.
  • If you get stuck in a perpetual Instagram loop, you become caught up in other people's lives. You can never define yourself. You never fix your problems.
  • Generally, shopping is done as an impulse or a distraction.
    • Why do you like shopping?

5. Environment

coming soon…

6. Intuition

  • Learned to trust intuition more with time. Used to ignore feeling signals. Decisions ignore processing signals. If you don't factor feelings into your choices you’re not being objective. You’re ignoring something.
  • Subconsciously getting an answer before your conscious mind even knows there is a question.
  • When do you use data vs. when do you use feeling? – That's the art of it.
    • You don't need data all the time. You’re too slow. Most of the time you don't have data (it’s hard to find, or it takes too long).
  • The goal is to tune into a different frequency where you pick up information where no one else can.
  • Masters of intuition
    • Carl Icahn – does everything based on intuition. More like an instinct and a feeling. He could just look at something and knew it would work.
    • George Soros – relied on “animal instincts”. Used the onset of acute pain as a signal that there was something wrong in my portfolio.
    • Kobe Bryant – gets in the zone. He just knows (and shoots). He isn’t thinking.
    • Musicians feel the music. They become one with the instrument.
  • How do you improve your feelings?
    • Sharpen senses – you have to get good at reading things; especially your thoughts.
    • Sense your market – then monitor to see how the market reacts. You’re either right or wrong.

7. Wealth Strategy

  • Cashflow - use info business - make $3+ mil /year profit
  • Cash reserves - holding cash in a bank account to give you confidence/peace ($1m)
  • Safe assets - house
  • Growth assets - stocks, real estate, crypto, business (Skool), acquisitions

Order of importance (wealth)

  1. Get $1m – Get to $1M cash, and then think about what to do.
  2. Buy house
  3. Make as much cash flow as possible
  4. Buy growth assets

No cash flow - you'll dry up.

No cash reserve - you'll get caught.

No safe asset - you’re not protected.

No growth asset - will take you longer to get rich.

Before you can make an investing structure, you need to figure out what you’re optimizing for? (generate cash flow, get rich, etc?)

  1. Figure out who's doing it.
  2. Figure out how they're doing it.
  3. Find their accountants. Find their lawyers. Find their people.
  4. Then copy their structures.

8. Frugality

  • Things that are unambiguous and undefined are scary.
    • Which thing do I not need? Cut it.
    • What do I need? Find cheaper options (without sacrificing quality).
      • Ie. GoogleFi instead of Verizon.
      • Ie. Blow-up pool instead of building pool into the ground.
  • If something is just a cost (phone bill, internet, water), I'm frugal. I don’t like waste.
  • Frugality is a common trait about billionaires. Frugality is a strength.
  • “If you have $1M in the bank, why be frugal?” — I got all the money by being like this. If something is going to make money, I am very bold.
  • Read these books
    • Made in America – “In order to have the lowest prices, we need to have the lowest costs.”
    • The Everything Store
  • When accountants come to audit Berkshire, Warren Buffet gives them a $20 allowance for lunch. Anything more than that is waste.
  • The money you save can be allocated into money that appreciates.

9. Process when to try something else

  • Have I tried hard enough?
  • Have I iterated enough?
  • Have I given it enough time?
  • How many people have gone through it (statistical significance)?
  • Has there been enough volume over enough time?
  • Do I have a better alternative?
  • How confident am I in this alternative?
  • Have I done my best?
  • Am I excited about the alternative?
  • Do I have a measurement in place?

When people try to access how people are doing something, some kind of framework emerges, then some people try to do the framework, but the problem is they’re not actually doing it.

Use the framework to get started, but immerse yourself in the practice of it.

Just do it all the time, always. Then when you’re not doing it, just think about it, always. You have to love it.

10. Concentration

Analyze where all these things are flowing towards or concentrated on:

  1. Where is our headcount concentrated?
    1. ie. every single person was directed towards ads, or by-product of ads. (customer support, ad buyers, live webinar chats)
    2. “We’re ads obsessed, not customers obsessed”
    3. Sid, Jesse, Hauser, Drae → all people interact with customers. customer-facing.
  2. Where is your and your team’s time/attention focused?
  3. Where is all our money being spent?
    1. Ads? Software to support ads?
  4. Is all of this flowing towards/concentrated on our CUSTOMERS?
    1. Put more resources towards the customer. New team structure. New team.

Optimizing is readjusting everything to concentrate on a few things.

11. Burnout vs. Lack of Passion.

Burnout

  • When you don’t feel anything. You feel nothing for anything. You get negative about everything. Always will see the negative in everything you look at. You find little things in people that anger you.
  • Solution – Take a 7-day break.
  • Causes – when you lose sight of the vision.

Lack of passion:

  • When you find excitement in other things, just not in the one thing you’re doing. Only negative about one thing, not just everything. When you want to do something else instead of the current thing.
  • Not a total absence of feeling.
  • Solution – Find your “Spark”. Figure out what causes the lack of passion, find a different role you enjoy inside the business.

12. Priority for people in business:

  1. Get to $100k /month profit
  2. Save $1m in cash (after tax) [CONSIDER +$1M YOUR NEW $0]
  3. Building YouTube / organic.
  4. Building a strong community.

*don’t move up until you complete each step fully.

13. Ads vs. Organic

  • With scale? Ads reach a ceiling, organic reaches “escape velocity”
  • Compounding? Ads have diminishing returns, organic has compounding
  • Cost? Ads cost money, organic generates revenue (adsense)
  • Goodwill? Ads harm reputation, organic wins people's hearts

14. Clean Thinking

  • Do less stuff.
  • Plan tomorrow today.
  • No social media (especially in the morning).
  • Protect sleep.
  • Eat clean.
  • Control how much stuff you do.
  • Hire/delegate people to do things you don’t like doing/suck at.
  • Stop drinking alcohol.
  • Exercise daily.
  • Plan your daily routine – place everything out.
  • Don’t use your phone for the first 2 hours.

15. How To Allocate Time

  • The best place to start is at the end - what’s the goal? (conversion event).
  • Step one: Clearly define the goal (if you can’t define the goal, define the problem. Need to be able to write it in a statement. The goal is to solve the problem. If you find the solution to the problem, you’ll find the goal.)
  • Step two: Gather resources/research for best-known methods to getting goal (this can come from your past memory/other people's memories)
  • Step three: Rank/score methods based on probability of achieving goal. (hypothesis)
    • How to score methods:
      • Probability of achieving goal (high)
      • Difficulty/time to execute (low)
      • Complexity of method (low)
  • Step four: Execute most probable method for getting goal
  • Step five: Measure results from experiment and optimize/refine, or try next method. (Scientific method)

^^ The whole process breaks when you don’t know what your goal is, or you change it all the time. The same way a facebook campaign will go berserk if you keep going on the 3rd day and changing the conversion event. Get the goal as clear as you can, and then think what are the best types of things to try here.

16. What’s The Problem?

  • Before you do any event, the only question you need to write down to remind yourself of what to do is: “What’s the problem?”. Everything can be resolved with that question.
  • If you ask most people “What’s the problem” they will talk about the question or they will explain the context. A problem forces you to be exact.
  • Don’t talk to your team about uncertainty or confusion about the problem. You will just spread your vagueness to them. Only speak when you have clarity on the vision.
  • Vagueness creates a lot of frustration.

17. Helping Others Love The Game

Michael Jordan

Q: What’s the secret to being the best basketball player?

A: To fall in love with the game. Once you do that, practice becomes play.

The people watching the clock never really succeed (ie. people who count how many hours they spent doing something.) When you’re in that mindset, they’re never going to succeed because they’re viewing the work as a chore and they’re viewing it as the employee mindset.

  • “I spent 7 hours on this and made no money. If I spent 7 hours at my McDonalds job, I would have made $95”
  • Teach people to fall in love with the game.
    • Show them how to do it.
    • Start with the space / environment (computer, location, desk, keyboard [fun feedback sounds], mouse [it’s fun to click], screen [alot of pixels], how laptop is organized, scents, music, headphones [music sounds good]).
    • Then show them how to use it.
    • Space should make you feel good (excite your senses).
    • Action item is to create their space, take a photo of their space, and share it with others.

The thing that keeps you showing up to school is your friends. How you make friends is by sharing something about yourself so that other people can see if they have something in common. Need to simulate to help people show up, share something about themselves, develop friendships and start to fall in love with the process and the game.

18. Vision

  • Time + Space + Capital + Passion = Vision
  • What space do you find really interesting?
    • Sam = online courses and online learning
  • Discovery and thinking about your vision is going to be time well spent.
  • Learn more about what interests you, what you are good at, and how you can add the most value to people.
  • Every vision is built on assumptions:
    • “We think this is a problem”
    • “We think this is going to become more of a problem”
    • “We think this is going to change”
    • “If we do this, then people are going to react like that”
  • Once you know the key assumptions, then you need to validate them.
  • Validate assumptions by working on projects and initiatives in the business.
  • The vision gets clearer the more you test those assumptions.
  • Vision = direction/north star
  • The plan, projects, initiatives change, but the general vision is what the statement should do.
  • Always have pictures on your end of what the company will look at certain points. What will the market look like at that point?

19. Thinking About Problems

  • Define the problems, and think about how to solve them in the best way possible.
  • “What are you thinking about all the time? Problems”
  • What is the thing? What are the problems? Explore the problems. Why are they problems? Why hasn't someone solved them? Who’s tried to solve them? How did that go? Who’s done it the best so far?
  • Once you have those facts collected, the best problems still exist, are big, and no one solved them. You naturally have to invent. That is the problem. There isn't a solution.
  • When you find that, you find a spot where you can innovate, instead of learning something from someone who has done it and doing it.

20. Overthinking

  • People procrastinate because they’re afraid to take action in the event they might fail.
  • There's a point in time when you’re taking too much action, and not thinking about most of the things you’re taking action on.
  • Do less action, but more thought out action. Move slower but more deliberately.
  • Try to reduce the number of decisions that need to be made. Then you only focus on the really important decisions, and try to get a small list of them. Then spend a lot of time thinking about those.

21. Culture

The best way to improve a culture is to make it harder to get in:

  • Google (hard interview process - takes months)
  • Goldman Sachs
  • Stanford
  • Harvard

22. Hiring

What would you make a hiring decision based on?

Judge of character:

  • Honesty
  • Integrity
  • Reliability
  • Consistency
  • Attention to Detail
  • No Ego Problems (causes most of problems)
  • No baggage

Never hire until it hurts, and there is a clear role for that person.

Greatness leaves a massive trail. If you can't find it, it’s not greatness.

Polymath people: good at lots of things.

  • When they’re good at multiple things, they’re able to apply those lessons to other areas/projects that they’re doing

23. Skool Logo

How Sam got inspired by the Skool logo:

Google ‘kids toys’. Look at the colors. See how colorful it is. Skool is supposed to be playful but for grownups. Corporate is blue and gray.

24. Workflow for building Skool

  • Idea generation – what should we do? (beta community, data, my experience as a user, other people using it).
  • Idea backlog – compile good ideas to consider later.
  • Every month take a group of ideas from the backlog and add them to a “stage”.
  • Design all screens for the *stage.
  • Share designs when they’re ready with the team at standup – they give feedback.
  • Team takes design and estimates how long it will take to build them.
  • Start designing new screens for the next stage which the team is building.
  • Review the product to make sure it matches the design until the whole team is happy.
  • Ship the feature/stage and announce it in the beta community for feedback.

25. Naming Product

Products sit below a brand. A person has a face for that brand, but the brand isn’t them.

  • Products: iPhone, Macbook, iPad
  • Brand: Apple
  • Person: Steve Jobs

They keep the name ‘iPhone’, but use versioning for new naming.

26. How to get good domain name (ie. Consulting.com)

  • Open up a Google doc and brainstorm a bunch of ‘cool words’ .com
  • Go to the website and see if it exists.
  • If a big company is already using it, forget about it. The assumption is that if a big established team or office is using it they’re probably not going to sell their domain.
  • Use this (https://research.domaintools.com/research/whois-history/) if the domain shows page is parked or, for sale to find the owner.
  • Buy the report for $49.
  • Email the most recent owner. If no response, go to the previous owner before that.
    • “Hey I'm interested in buying this. How much are you selling it for?”
    • Let them say the price.
    • Use fake email addresses & an,e to reach out to people.

27. Measurement

You don’t create a plan until you have the baseline.

  1. Get baseline
  2. Plan
  3. Implementation of plan
  4. Measurement of new results against baseline
    1. Improving or getting worse

ie. Take a temp of a room; you need to know that first before you made it colder or hotter.

28. Learning something vs. hiring someone to do it

Only learn if you need to know how to do.

  • Determine how scarce the skill is, and how much it costs to hire someone to do it.
  • The impact it has on your business for every small degree of skill improvement ( = high leverage activity to perform)