The Sam Ovens Podcast

How do you come up with those 10x ideas that get you exponential growth? How do you break the linear growth trajectory and go exponential? I can tell you this: It doesn't happen by doing more of what you're doing now. Exponential growth happens when you rethink everything and take a radically new perspective. Jeff Bezos said: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points". How you see things and take a perspective is worth more than raw intelligence. The best way to see things in a different way is to rise above the day-to-day chaos and look down on it from a higher level. In this podcast, I share exactly that.

More with less -- That's the objective of evolution, to remove waste and optimize for value and efficiency. Darwin was right: Life is a game of "survival of the fittest"... Only the strong survive. If you want your business to survive the evolutionary arms race, you must continuously improve efficiency. The best way to do that is to "machine everything". Eliminate the need to think. Squeeze every ounce of utility out of every resource possible, and then figure out how to squeeze some more. If you don't, you'll cease to exist.

How do you find the TRUTH in today's world? 

How do you navigate the minefield of misinformation, fake news, propaganda, biased views, and blatant lies?

Most people are walking around blindly with their umbilical cords hanging out looking for something to plug them into. 

Being successful requires good decision making and good decision making requires accurate information and beliefs.

Plain and simple: If you listen to the opinion of most people, you will believe a lie, make poor decisions and fail to be successful.

Accurate information lies at the heart of success and finding it should be your highest priority at all times.

Most people fail to see long-term cause and effect relationships...They're shortsighted and they only think in timeframes of today, this week and this month. If they don't see rewards from the actions they take immediately, they give up or find a new shiny object and the same pattern repeats itself again. It's a vicious cycle like a snake eating its tail. If you take action today, the true reward of that action will occur 1-2 years from now, not today. Most people are blind to this. If you want to succeed in life and business you need to understand cause and effect timeframes so that you can think clearly and execute on the power-law activities that truly move the needle. This video shows you how to do that!

Most people suffer from the "natural giftedness" delusion. They think that successful people are born naturals who master things immediately -- and -- If they try something new and they're not good at it and confident on the first few tries, it's just not meant to be. This sort of thinking is fucked up. Everybody is born into this world the same way. Everything must be learned through practice. Sheer repetition, consistency and time. You will NEVER be successful in life or business until you turn the hard things you avoid doing into base instincts. Things you execute on all day, every day, without even thinking.  To do this you have to go through a few stages: The first one is to brute force your way through, then turn it into a habit, then turn it into a base instinct. The magic happens when hard things become base instincts.

How can you do things that others can't? That's the question you must ask yourself if you want to gain a competitive advantage, slaughter the competition and win in business. Most entrepreneurs try to gain "easy advantages". They ask the question: "What's fast, cheap and easy to build that will give us an advantage?". The problem with easy advantages is that they are replicated easily and when that happens, they are no longer advantages. Billionaires ask the advantage question another way...They ask: "What's slow, extremely expensive and excruciatingly hard to build that will give us an advantage?". The best competitive advantages are the ones with "moats" and high barriers to entry. In this podcast, I share exactly how you can build a moat around your business so that you can slaughter the competition and win.

Why do people like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Dr. Dre wear the same clothes every day? It's because of something called "decision fatigue". It doesn't matter what the decision is, all decisions zap the same amount of brainpower and you only have so much of it each day. Should I wear my white shoes, red shoes or blue shoes? Should I hire a new sales rep or continue slaving away at it myself? These two decisions use the same amount of energy but they have very different outcomes and rewards. One leads to nothing while the other leads to a radical life change that affects your wealth and happiness for the rest of your life. Understanding decision fatigue is an awakening experience. It will make you live your life in a radically different way.

Do you struggle to stick to things and get distracted by new shiny objects? If you look back over the past month or the past year --  How many different niches, opportunities or methods have you tried? Shiny object syndrome is something that plagues most entrepreneurs and renders them helpless in their fight for success. Here's what it looks like: Somebody chooses e-commerce as their area of interest and starts learning the game, absorbing information and putting in the work...Two weeks go by, and by then, things start to look harder than they'd imagined, they start to see the real "depth" of their chosen field. At this stage, the entrepreneur loses their passion for the field and starts looking on social media to see what other people are doing. They see a guru in another field like Crypto wearing fancy watches, flying in private jets and driving nice cars -- And at this moment -- In this moment of sound-minded reason, they think to themselves: "Ahhh the reason I'm not rich yet is that I'm in the wrong field! It's not my fault, it's not the fact that I've only been doing this for two weeks -- It's because I'm trying to do e-commerce and obviously Crypto is where the money's at!". This isn't rational, it's flat out lunacy. It's the kind of shit people get put in straight jackets for. But as insane as it is -- This is the practice of 99% of entrepreneurs who are just starting out, today! If you suffer from this relentless disease, do yourself a favor and listen to this.

Most people think they're hustling and grinding, but really they're just going hard on maintenance.  And no matter how hard you go on maintenance --  You're NEVER going to make the boat go faster! You're never going to win the race. To win in life and business, maintenance is never enough, you have to get better.   You have to get leaner, faster, lighter, stronger, more agile, etc. This video shows you how to differentiate between maintenance tasks and performance tasks and how to channel all of your energy into performance so that you can become the apex predator and win.

Do you know that Amazon has 560,000 employees and 300,000,000 customers? Right now, today, there are people out there that are struggling to reply to their emails or get 1 customer --  So how does Amazon get 300 million of them? The secret Jeff Bezos uses is something called "chunking".   

Chunking is the process of clearly defining the end goal and then reverse engineering all the way back to the current day --  By doing this, he takes a monumental task and turns it into small bite-sized chunks that can be executed on this hour and today. The concept of chunking has completely changed my life and allowed me to achieve long term things... Today I thought I'd share it with you because I'm sure it can do the same for you!