5 Insane Productivity Tips With Daymond John From Shark Tank

You know one thing I get asked a lot is “Tai what do you do to stay productive, and get the most out of your time?” Productivity is something that you need to practice constantly to get good at, but if you find what works best for you, and you get good at implementing those skills, your going to be able to work harder, and smarter, you know? So I sat down with Daymond John, Shark Tank shark, entrepreneur, author, fashion mogul to talk about being more productive, and the meaning of hard work and to give you 5 productivity tips. He’s got a new book, “Rise and Grind”. This book is full of tactics to hack your productivity, and be a better, harder worker, so he’s definitely someone I wanted to talk to more and get some of his ideas. Tai: All right. Live with Daymond John. Daymond: What's happening? Tai: Shark Tank judge, the first Shark Tank judge, and he says better than Mark Cuban. Mark, I hope you're watching this. Daymond: He knows that, he knows this. Tai: He already knows this. Daymond: This is not a new one for tomorrow. Tai: I want to talk, because a lot of entrepreneurs follow you. I mean, a lot of people follow you in general, but for the entrepreneur crowd, who are just out walking around, and I want to kind of give like five things that people can take away, in terms of being more productive. Daymond: Absolutely Tai: The first one you told me is obsession. What is your definition of obsession? Because I meet people that say they're obsessed, but I don't believe them, because they get distracted easily. Daymond: Yeah. My version, or my understanding of obsession with your business is the same as your obsession with your kid; the same exact thing. Like, it's a joy, it's an honor, and you love how the process unfolds daily. The things you figure out how you could be more productive, or add more value to the business, to customers, and things of that nature. Tai: You don't look at it really as a daily job, you look at it as the process. Daymond Right. Tai: What do you think though for somebody watching ... who is too stubborn though; their original business idea, they might take your words and go, "No matter what I'm gonna make this product work." How do you know whether to persevere or, you know, switch and make that pivot? Daymond: You know, in business it's pretty simple, right? It's pretty binary. It's like, you either increase sales or reduce cost. After you've tried it enough, and you find that your customers are dissatisfied with you, you're not being able to move the product. You don't know what it's going to be. Is it going to be the name? Is it going to be the customer you're serving? Is it going to be the price? Tai: For sure Daymond: Whatever the case is, but you have to exhaust all resources, but if you're going with it with the mentality, just throw more money at it, it's gonna work, then that's not happening. Tai: Yeah Daymond: You have to create this following of consumers who are gonna be your biggest ambassadors, they're gonna be religious about it, you're gonna listen to them, but anybody who doesn't want to listen to the other people, whether they're working for them, or the people that they're selling, they're crazy. Because, that's what innovation is Tai: Absolutely Daymond: People don't sit down and say, "Let's just think of something new." It's the fact that I thought of something, and you go, "Well, maybe you should do it this way," and I go, "Maybe I should do it this way," and then something comes out of it. Tai: So, it's the back and forth. Daymond: Yeah. It's the communication. It's the only thing that separates us from other animals, it's the communication; the ability to communicate accurately Tai: Ok, lets take a question from one of our Twitter followers. Daymond: Ok Tai: Free Majari on Twitter says, "Thai, it's discouraging when you have good ideas, and you can't afford to get them started." Daymond: Right Tai: So number two, how are you productive when you've got an idea, or you've got a business you want to launch, but you don't have any money. You've heard the saying, "It takes money to make money.” What did you do? Let's take what you did with FUBU, because you started a huge brand. Daymond: So number one, money is not going to satisfy you. Money, actually, is a superficial high. It's going to let people lie to you and things of that nature. See, I started with one hat. Zuckerberg started with one friend Tai: Sure Daymond: Right? One. You have to start it. A true entrepreneur, what they do is they act, they learn, and then they repeat. They do it on a very small scale, and then they throw gasoline, and kerosene on it to blow up. Daymond: Bottom line is, you don't need money. Over 65% of the Forbes, or Inc. 1000 wealthiest people in the world are self-made men and women. That means they started with zero. Tai: Yeah. Daymond: Don't let people discourage you with that. Go out there and do something, act, learn, repeat. Sell one thing, sell two things, sell three things. How did you start? Did you just wake up a success? Tai: No. I agree with you, because sometimes having too much money, and too much success, you make a mistake on a larger scale. Daymond: The number one reason why small businesses fail is over-funding. That's the one reason. People don't realize that, because I like to use the scenario of you want to open up a cupcake shop, because your grandmother made cupcakes and they were amazing. So, you go with a $100,000 loan; you haven't sold one cupcake yet. Tai: Right Daymond: You open up this beautiful shop. Your staff has cupcake looking hats, the register is in a shape of a cupcake, right? The couch is in the shape of a cupcake, but then you start. You realize that there was a little old lady in the church about three blocks away who was selling cupcakes like crack for the last ten years. You now have to close down shop, you have seven years of bad credit, nobody's talking to you, and you got a shit load of cupcakes in your backyard. Tai: Yeah. It's kind of like, you have to go on a date before you get married. Raising $100,000 or a million dollars for a business, you might realize you got married to the wrong person too quick. Daymond: Exactly, and by the way, don't quit your day job, all right? Remember everybody tells you about quitting your day job? Well, listen, I worked at Red Lobster for five years making $30,000 a year, while I went home and worked on FUBU. I slept three hours a night, but I made $30,000 a year; that was $150,000 after five years. I had medical. I was taking home all the food the people weren't eating; all the leftovers, because I had to feed myself, right? And, I had my friends that worked at Red Lobster help me sew the shirts, and sell the hats. Daymond: I would've had to do two million dollars worth of business with FUBU to bring home that same $150,000, you know? Tai: Yeah. Joel Salatin, my first mentor, he said he didn't quit his day job until he had one-years worth of savings. For sure. Daymond: I still go back and work at Red Lobster sometimes. Tai: All right, I'd like to see that. I'm gonna show up at that Red Lobster. All right, let's do this. Third tip, productivity tip, because he's from Venezuela. He says, "Any advice for entrepreneurs in an economy with hyper inflation." Or, we could say, a non-U.S. economy, maybe a third-world country, not to use the word third-world, but what would you do if you weren't in the U.S.? Some countries, a little bit less entrepreneur-friendly, what's your advice to our global listeners? Daymond: I don't really know if I can give them advice. Entrepreneurship is not new, we've been bartering and trading since the beginning of time. It's just a label on it now. I don't think, whether it's another country, or another planet, there's anything gonna be different. Tai: Right Daymond: When you have to come out with something, an idea, a product, a service, you have to perfect it with a small group of people, you have to then let that be infectious, and over deliver to those people, and then you have to grow the business you know, point-by-point. Listen, the reason I'm on Shark Tank is not because I have this big PhD and all these kind of things; I just have common sense, right? Daymond: So I come at it with a very every-day-man's approach. The fundamentals of business are never gonna change, whether it's in another country, or the fact that technology comes here. There's two ways to operate business: increase sales or reduce cost. There's three ways to deal with a customer: acquire a new one, upsell a current one, or make one buy more frequently. All these things are going to need to be done in any business you have. Tai: Right Daymond: As simple as that. Listen, there's a lot of people that come over to this great country of ours, and they are entrepreneurs and they make it over here and they come and blow up, right? Because, they were like, "Man, it was hard over there. This is easy over here." Tai: For sure. Ok so on to number four. What is the best advice you ever received from somebody?" Daymond: "Money is a great slave, but a horrible master." Every time I started to realize that, the meaning of that, and every time I see somebody that opened a business because they want to be rich, or every time as I was sharing with you, that the friends of mine that we grew up with that are all dead or in jail, because they decided to sell crack when crack came around when I was a kid, learning they were only just chasing money, that really was the determining factor for most of the people's failures I've ever seen. Tai: That’s a great quote too. Daymond: And, as soon as you get the money you're gonna blow it on a lot of things, because you're like, "Man, I finally got it," right? But, the day that you start to do something because of a passion, a drive, and you know this solves a problem, and you do it because of a love; you will do that forever. Tai: Definitely, so passion fuels productivity. Daymond: Listen, you're doing something you love, man, it's fascinating and it's just ... it's great. Tai: Yeah, one of my mentors said, "If you have to take a vacation from your job, you should never go back." Daymond: That’s true Tai: If you have to. It's okay to take a vacation, but if you got that feeling like, "I gotta get outta here, I've been two months working." Daymond: It’s over Tai: You're not gonna make it in this game Daymond: It’s done. ======= If you're tired of your current situation and you feel like you've gotta get out of it, I've created a program that will show you How I Make Money Online. I've broken it down into 4 steps. [Yes, I want to watch Tai walk me through starting a new online business from scratch with these 4 simple steps.]( ======= Tai: Ok, so one final question. Number five. How many hours a week do you recommend somebody work? Is that even a right question? Daymond: No, that's the wrong question, and that's the whole purpose for "Rise and Grind." Because, the "Rise and Grind" is a productivity book, right? Because, it was at a point where I was already eight, nine years in the Shark Tank, 60 or 80 companies I'm investing in, got a little two year old baby girl at home, I got all my other companies, I have my health and things that I have to wonder about, and make sure I work on. I started interviewing and talking to some dear friends of mine, like Katherine Zeta Jones, Santana, and other friends that you may not know; like my buddy, Kyle Maynard, who climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, but he was born with no arms, and no legs, and he climbed it with no prosthetics. Tai: Wow! Daymond: Right? And, I started to say to them, "I want to know your productivity tips, because the Daymond John at 20 is no longer the Daymond John at 48." Tai: Ok, so like collective knowledge. Daymond: I can't put in the work like I've done back then, and mastery is not just something you learn right away, boom, you're a master. When Bruce Lee was still alive at 35 he was a master at Kung Fu, but at 70 with the same ... with different muscle retention, different speed and different strength, he's gonna have to learn a master to fight a different way. Like, Muhammad Ali, when he came out of jail when they stripped him, he had to learn the rope-a-dope to become more effective to beat George Foreman. So, productivity, in regards to time, is very, very different for each person. We were just on the phone with Grant Cardone. He'll schedule a meeting for 9:06, because he wants everybody to know how serious he is about time, right? Tai: Yeah Daymond: So, you have to think about productivity as various different things and in this book I have 15 subjects that show you maybe if you put them all together, a hundred different ways to be productive that fits you. Tai: In “Rise and Grind.” Daymond: The one answer to you know, for life because honestly the biggest question that everybody has is work/life balance. How do you do it? Tai: So, there's a good book "Everything Store" about Jeff Bezos, who's now the richest man in the world. He would fire anybody who asked him, "What's gonna be my work/life balance?" He was like, you're automatically out, because he said like you said, obsession. Then you're not thinking that way. But like you said, so let me throw this at you. I'm a big believer that it's not just the hardest worker, it's not just the one who only grinds. The top ten men in the world have more money than the bottom 3.5 billion combined. So, obviously the top ten people aren't just working harder. I've been...I grew up in, you know, I was born in Long Beach. My family, my dad's from Harlem. I've seen people working hard, two, three jobs. Grinding. Been to India. People working picking up trash. 14 hours a day making 20 bucks a month. Tai: So, what's the balance...let's not talk about just work/life balance, but what's the balance between working hard and working smart? What have you found, like...let's talk about FUBU. Daymond: So you're asking me the entire reason I wrote the book because if you look at it, smart people know hard work is what you need to do. We've already established that, but a lot of people like "Thank you for telling me hard work is important but I need direct and very precise things to do to work smarter." Because it's like me saying "Go to the park and shoot around and one day you'll get into the NBA." No, you need a coach to show you how to jump higher. And move faster and these basically read your plays and do everything else that you're doing. Right? Tai: Right Daymond: Productive, super productive people are extremely, extremely selfish. They're very selfish in a good way. Tai: Okay Daymond: The way I like to say it is Michael Jordan, he didn't run around to everybody else's basketball practices. He busted his ass so he be the best member to the team. And as I look at people here, they all said the same thing in this book, but al executed different ways. Like I said, they'll wake up in the morning, they won't give up there sovereignty to everybody else by answering all their stuff. They won't even go onto Instagram because you go on Instagram, everybody else is smarter, skinnier, or you know, they got a bigger house. Whatever the case. Right? Tai: The narcissism effect of Instagram. Daymond: They'll start also, giving praise and thanks for what they currently have, so it puts them in the right mindset instead of thinking about what they don't have. They're currently in the moment all the time. Right? They also are putting some form of exercise and/or adrenaline in their body the beginning of the day. It makes them more productive throughout their entire time. They're scheduling time, very specifically, they schedule time with their loved ones and families. Because usually that's the only thing we don't schedule. Tai: Which is so important. Daymond: Right? The most important thing they do is they do some form of meditation and/or goal setting. They go to a dark place. They find out who they are and they look and they say, "Is that the way I want my obituary to read? Am I living the life that I want my obituary to read? What do I want? Then they start knocking these down and maybe they'll get to these. Tai: Sure Daymond: Another person in the book says, "Hey, I write all the things I love in life and all the things I hate to do. And what I do is the things I hate to do, I try to outsource it and/or get rid of the people that are making me hate it. And I find myself moving towards the things that I love." So, those are the keys to being able to really work hard and smart because if you do all that you're gonna take the proper steps. You're gonna surround yourself with the right people. Find the right mentors. You're gonna do your homework on the situation and try to solve it at the easiest and faster was to then take those small affordable steps. Tai: Yeah. I like the one that you said about the two lists, the A and the B, because sometimes people's goal list is like 300 things. And I'm like, you're not gonna get all of those done. Daymond: You suffer from analysis paralysis after that. You always are trying to get out of the gate. You're like trying to do double dutch, but you never jump into the ropes. Tai: Yeah. So much of life is just jumping in. So let’s talk about something you’ve had to deal with. Let’s talk about dyslexia. So, you had an obstacle. How'd you overcome it? Daymond: Well, first of all, I didn't know I was dyslexic for a long period of time. Alright? But I am dyslexic and I think dyslexia is one of the gifts that I've been given to help me become and entrepreneur because I would have to read books two and three times. Like I read "Think and Grow Rich" probably now 15 times because it's probably the most effective book that I've ever read in my life. would go out and try to do things that I read because I didn't know if I retained it properly. So, I would, it would make me take action. And it was my cheat when I was in school. When I was in school, in high school, they had a class that said you can work from one, every alternative week you can work and get credit. So, the last thing I wanted to do was obviously be challenged with the school work, so I started working. Tai: Nice Daymond: It allowed me to do that and I just think that being dyslexic is somewhat a gift. I mean, if you look at the 12 Sharks because if you add the guest Sharks together, out of 12 of us, eight of us are dyslexic. Tai: Really? Daymond: Yeah. Tai: Huh. Yes, it's not always what you think. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of stuff, Harvard MBA, all this; there's a lot of B.S. out there. When it comes actually being an entrepreneur, you do need some smarts, but you need a lot of street smarts. And street smarts don't have anything to do with the things that modern day school measures for. Daymond: Yeah. You need common sense. You need to be able to take action. You need to question the system and question everything. You know, I...well, listen, when I was growing up and I looked at all these people, these bright names like Henry Ford and all these people out there. And seeing everything in my neighborhood that I was consuming, I was saying to myself "Well, what makes them smarter than me? Why can't I do this? You know. Other people just get intimidated by all these other things. Everything else ins so grand to them. It's not. Everybody puts their pants on the same exact way. Tai: Yeah for sure. And you know, sometimes people don’t get enough credit for that. .Look, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Arnold Schwarzenegger's son was gonna come here and his dad's rich. I mean his dad is Arnold Schwarzenegger. And people say, "Oh, well you should dismiss his success." No, a lot of rich kids get on crack, heroine, and meth. Daymond: Of course. Tai: He’s a superstar. I love this guy. He's smart. Knows business. So he started out with some advantages. His dad's Arnold, but still you gotta take the advantage and run with them. And then there's the flip side Daymond: And then those advantages could be disadvantages. Tai: Exactly Daymond: In my last book "The Power of Broke," I was talking about Steve Aoki. You know, his dad had money. His dad owned Benihana’s. And Steve was like...you know, and dad came over here after World War II or whatever the case is. They're hard working man and Steve was like "I'm gonna go spin records." And his father was like "That's not living. You can't do that." But then when he went into New York City, down to CBVG and all those places, they would say "Get out of here, little rich boy." Tai: Right Daymond: So, a lot of times having wealth and/or notoriety can become a curse. I believe it was either Carnegie or Rockefeller said you know, "What you need to be successful is to be born into poverty with your health." Tai: It's like dyslexia, you being born in you know, in the streets. Your friends dying in prison. That obstacle was actually the way because if you had maybe been born middle class or lower upper class you might've just rested. Daymond: Yeah, you know, I may have wanted, you know...Listen, my father and mother got divorced. I never saw my father after I was ten years old, but my father would've...he'd come from a line of families who are like engineers. I would've grown up to have to go to school and be challenged with the dyslexia and become and engineer. Nothing wrong with that life. Listen maybe I would've had the drive and been using that engineer advantage to change the world, but I had to get up there in the obstacle of not having a father and having to be the breadwinner with my mother. In a very, very bad neighborhood became my driving force to wanna see success and wanna take my mother out of that neighborhood, as well as myself. You know? Tai: Right Daymond: And listen, I'm a prime example of a short little dyslexic boy who got left back in school, who grew up in the hood, who now you get to see me beat up on Richard Branson and Mark Cuban every single weekend. You know, just outsmart them. Right? I don't care that they have more money than God. I'm just smarter. You can be that person. Tai: Definitely. Thank you, my friend. Daymond: Thanks for having me man. Tai: I appreciate it. Daymond is just one of those people that you can just see the passion and drive behind them. He’s full of knowledge, and hopefully you guys can learn a lot from him. Look, if you can find your passion, and then chase after it, and give it all you got; eventually you’ll succeed at whatever it is your doing. You just have to figure out what works for you, so you can balance work and the other things you enjoy and that are important to you.. If you can obsess over whatever it is you’re doing, you’re going to have to evaluate what is most important to you, and then prioritize those things. Life is all about maximizing the time you have to dedicate yourself to the things that are important to you. What ways have you found to maximize your potential? Try these productivity tactics and let me know what you think. Stay Strong, Tai P.S. If you want to know how to Make Money Online, I've created a program where I show you How I Make Money Online. I've broken it down into 4 simple steps that you can follow. How do you think your life would change if you had an automated online business making you extra income? [Yes, show me the 4 simple and practical steps to make money online.]( **Tai receives a commission if you buy from Billy Gene. Tai and Billy are professional internet marketers. Their success and the income possibilities mentioned aren't typical and are not a guarantee you will make money. You could make more, less, or none at all.** [Manage Email Alerts]( | [Unsubscribe From All]( | [Unsubscribe From Tai's Emails Only]( You have received this email to {EMAIL} because you are a registered [Tailopez.com]( subscriber. 8581 Santa Monica Blvd. Suite #703 West Hollywood, CA USA