The biggest investment you’ll ever make in life, is the one you make in yourself. — Robert Herjavec
This past week, I had the opportunity of seeing Robert Herjavec speak in person. He is well known as one of the investors on the show Shark Tank, as well as running his own technology security company THG in Canada.
I wasn’t expecting much from the free event that he was hosting, but his speech had a lot of takeways which I personally found valuable.
1. No one cares about failures 🙈
This is pretty common in the world of entrepreneurship because no one actually likes to talk about their failures and instead focus on the success stories.
There is some validity to that. In Robert’s case, his start to success was selling a company for $30 million. Does anyone talk about the companies that he did not sell before that? Or how about the fact that he started the company in 1990 but didn’t sell it until an entire decade later?
When it comes to being in the process of staying motivated while building your company, it’s good to know that success is at least a decade-long journey. I started IronMic barely a year ago, so to have high expectations and not keep going after one or two failures won’t yield any form of success.
2. You have to push for your own success 💪
Robert shared something about his life that really resonated with me. As someone who is introverted, he expected people and success to come to him. If you simply put in the hard work, then the success will come.
I thought that’s how it was for so long, and am still guilty of not being proactive. While the hard work is important, networking and marketing are even more important. This is quite difficult as an introvert, but I’m slowly learning the value of meeting the right people at the right time.
There is still a fine balance where you don’t want to seem too pushy, but if you’re genuine about everything that you do then it shouldn’t be a problem. The important thing is that you should be more willing to help others before expecting anyone to help yourself.
3. Invest in yourself 👈
The quote that I started off with is the best advice that Robert said he received in life.
In reference of going through failures and pushing for your success, this makes a ton of sense. Each failure becomes a learning opportunity, and I always like to think about how I can better myself to become more communicative and genuine with other people.
Don’t get this mixed up with never taking action though. Learning and self improvement are important, but if you never use the skills you acquire to do something, then it all becomes moot.
🗂 Tab Dump
I keep a lot of tabs open with useful resources that I plan on looking at later, so why not share them with you?
- Eye for Detail - A podcast about products, hosted by Alex Price and Ryan Glover.
- The Kanye Story - From lying in bed with zero ideas to negotiating with the biggest superstar on planet earth.
- BuzzStream Discovery - Find the right influencers for your content marketing efforts.
📅 Past and upcoming updates
I released a podcast episode this week titled Providing a good developer UX. I talked about misconceptions, benefits, and ways to provide good developer UX.
Also, I reposted my article about perfection to my blog.
There are some videos that I recorded from Robert Herjavec’s talk which I may share on the podcast. If you’d like to see that, let me know! This may also be a slower week while I get some things in order, but I’ve also been working on some IronMic updates which will hopefully release this week.