Own Your Story to Stand Out - Andy Ellwood

Speaker 1 0:00

I believe that the most defiant and rebellious thing you can do in the future is to be extremely human and vulnerable , because everything else is going to be perfect . Ai is going to morph people who don't have their own thoughts into a category of people who don't think for themselves , And if you don't know why you think what you think or how you got to that decision on your own , there's going to be a computer that tells you you're wrong , And if you can't show your work and how you got to the answers that you got to , I believe that you're going to be left behind , And I think that being able to own your own story because it is the only thing in the world that you're the only person who's an expert on You're an expert on your story and no one else comes anywhere close . You are the de facto number one in the entire world out of 8 billion people . You're the only person that knows your story as well as you do , And it's probably , maybe the only thing that you will ever be . The number one thing , the number one expert in the world on Doesn't matter Even if you invented AI , right Like . There's seven people that are called the Godfather of AI , right Satoshi , the inventor of Bitcoin . Nobody knows who it is , And there's probably a group of people right You are the secret sauce and you are the only person who knows how that secret sauce is made , And I think that that , for me , is why the origin story just continues to come up .

Speaker 1 1:32

I had a team member once who , like we went through a whole interview process We were trying to get her to join the company went through recruiting , interviewing , salary negotiations , the whole thing , And we're like all right , So so welcome to the team . She goes I have one more step . And I said what's that ? And she said I need you to read this document , sign it and hand it back to me . And I was like what's the document ? And she said it's a . This is what it's like to work with me documents , And I need you to know that . These are things that other people have said about what it's like to work with me , And I'm not always the easiest person to work with And there are certain things that I will care way more about than I probably should , but I'm going to care because I care And you have to be okay with me showing up that way at this company , And it was like nine or 11 bullet points And I read them all and I was like she was so , after reading that , do you still want to work with me ? Do you still want to hire me ? I was like , yeah , she goes , okay . And then we , and then she was one of my favorite team members , But , like she actually had , she knew so much about herself that she knew where we might get tripped up somewhere down the line And so , instead of hiding the things that would eventually come up , she just kind of led with them .

Speaker 1 2:43

You know , it makes me think of the battle scene from eight mile , when Eminem is up against like the best rapper and like they make it to the finals , And he goes first and he says Hey , you're going to make fun of me for living in the trailer park . You're going to make fun of me for my girlfriend sleeping with so and so You're going to make fun of my mom . You're going to make fun of me from being white and poor and broke . You're going to make fun of me for all these reasons . Go ahead , I dare you do this . And he just stole all the thunder by actually exposing the things that were challenging , the things that were hard in his life . That person didn't have anything to over him anymore And I think that that's you know something that , like you know , my car got .

Speaker 1 3:20

My car got repossessed when I was selling private jets because I had missed an auto pay for making car payments . I wasn't bad on top of my finances in my early twenties And like , I woke up one morning to go to a very important meeting where I was going to be driving clients And I bought a very nice car to show off for my clients because in Dallas , Texas , you are what you drive And my car was literally not parked up front And I was like what happened ? And I called . I said somebody stole my car And they're like sir , did you know your five months behind your car payments ? I was like I didn't know that And so for a long time that was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened .

Speaker 1 4:00

But it's actually , you know , one of the biggest lessons in my career was owned what you can control . Right , I can control my finances And I just was taking them for granted . There's so many things we can't control . Own the thing you can , But that was the lesson that came from the most embarrassing thing that ever happened . If we start to think about those things in our life , they're like we're like , Oh no , if they ever found out this out about me , that might actually be the thing that is the most important thing for people to know about you . Like it shaped you into who you are . It's the scar that tells them those stories . It's the thing that points people in the direction of some framework in which they can think about you . And giving people that heads up , or giving people the ability to understand that about you , is just going to make y'all's chance at connection that much stronger , that much faster .