The curse of success and the art of being successful

You may not know my story well.

However, by the time I was 21, I was $1 million in debt.

In the next 10 years, I would go from $1 million in debt to being a decamillionaire.

I’ve been an Entrepreneur ever since I can remember, even though it didn’t run in my family. I even had my first business when I was 7—selling eggs in my neighborhood.

Me accepting an award at 16 years old for my agency that helped build online communities and software.

I became a millionaire in my teenage years, but that taught me something I fell into debt. While it was deeply painful—it taught me a lot.

I’ve actually lost it all twice in my life. So, to build a position that’s unlikely to fall again, I’ve collected many lessons about business success—but that’s for another time…

Why? Because I’m here to talk to you about the rarely discussed curse of success…

Just because you’re successful at one thing doesn’t mean you’ll be successful at something else.

A while back, someone I mentored asked me:

I replied…

Why? Because if I act like it’ll be successful, I might get over-confident.

When I was 19, I was trying to raise money from an investor…

He was a great guy, a mentor of sorts, but he wouldn’t give me a dollar until I did one crucial thing… fail.

At the time, it made no sense.

Now it does.

Success barely teaches one-tenth of what failure teaches.

The most dangerous person to encounter is the person who's never failed…

Because the person who hasn’t failed doesn’t understand that what they do next has a higher chance of failure. They also don’t have the mental and physical requirements to transfer success from one thing to the next.

I’ve seen this many times—and I hope I’ve learned enough lessons to transfer successfully.

When I was a teenager—I was one of the best in the world at building online communities and monetizing them.

Now, I’m going from an Entrepreneur who’s become extremely successful at helping Entrepreneurs scale 7+ figure businesses to spending the majority of my time, attention, resources, and money in transferring the skills, knowledge, and influence into owning dozens of businesses across the world.

And… having a great understanding of this transition, I hope to do it successfully.

To do that, I have had to realize that being successful has a certain set of disadvantages…

1. If you’re not careful, those around you (including your customers) do not tell you whether your idea or concept is good or bad

2. When you believe everything you touch will be successful—you don’t fully understand the risks of what you’re building or scaling

3. When you have an unfair advantage in something, you can create a scenario where your level of success is unsustainable without you—creating false hopes about continued success

4. When you are successful, you have the potential to accept failure less easily, making you have increased loss aversion

5. When you have more money, you tend to allow things to take longer than they should

6. When you have resources, you spend less time and effort as your life is more comfortable, meaning that it’s possible that you don’t innovate as much as possible

7. When you’re successful, you can underestimate what’s required to make something work because the last thing has a compound effect on all the work you put in to create that success

Simply put—transferring from one thing to the next thing and bringing success along with it isn’t easy.

So, what does a successful person do? I’m no expert on this, however, here’s my attempt to turn my success as an Entrepreneur into a massive success as an investor…

1. Surround myself with amazing people ready to challenge my ideas, thinking, and beliefs, along with advisors and mentors who have done things similar to what I am doing

2. Never spend money just because I have it to spend

3. Have clearly designed ways to know if something I’m doing makes sense or not

4. Ensure that I never go into something expecting to “win” but do everything I possibly can to learn the most important lessons

5. Allow myself to slow down and not try to adhere to the standards of the version of me that achieved my current level of success

6. Be okay with the fact that much of what I do this season may not be successful, and know that this is part of transitioning to the next great adventure

In short, what generally makes you successful the first time around isn’t what’s going to help you build that next level of success.

It’s a new identity. A new set of skills. A new set of beliefs. A new everything.

Being successful helps all the above become a reality.

However, going into something thinking it’s going to be as “easy” as the thing that you’ve mastered?

That’s delusional—and it’s why I and many Entrepreneurs I’ve worked with go from wild success to abject failure in an instant.

The potential failure of transitioning into the “next” thing is far better than…

Continuing to do what you’re amazing at doing created success, and knowing that it’s not the thing aligned in your life causing a lack of happiness and fulfillment.

Always go, no matter what the thing that life calls you to.

Failure is simply the universe showing you the way toward alignment, and alignment and success are brothers.

- Scott