Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone and Into Your Purpose with Dan Martell

The Fail On Podcast with Rob Nunnery - Fail Your Way To An Inspired Life

Dan Martell is a Canadian entrepreneur and an experienced angel investor who has invested in over 33 companies. Dan is the founder of Clarity.fm, co-founder of Flowtown and founder of Spheric Technologies.

He has also been a mentor at 500Startups, GrowLabs and theC100.org. He believes “you can only keep what you give away,” and is heavily involved in many charitable organizations & community events.

In this episode Dan will be sharing with us how he got his start in business and why actually being in jail led to a completely new perspective on life. He also talks about the two magical questions to ask people that will make networking effortless. And finally, the simple way to remove all risk from starting a business through pre-selling.

And much more!

Key Points From This Episode:

• Dan tells us how he made his first dollar online and how that moment changed everything.
• How going through chaos as a kid led Dan to uncover his entrepreneurial side.
• Find out how Dan learned to code through reading books.
• The biggest lessons Dan took away from his time spent in jail and at rehab.
• Why Dan explains failure as experiments that ran too long.
• The importance of having the right people around you.
• Dan’s Dream 100 list and why he divides it into peers, advisors and mentors.
• Why being good at asking questions is a magical skill.
• Approaching the right type of people and finding a good mentor.
• Hear about Dan’s biggest failures while on this path of entrepreneurship.
• Discover what the entrepreneurial pendulum is.
• Automatic negative thoughts and the effect it has on you and your business.
• Choosing to be grateful and changing your mindset.
• Getting out of your comfort zone and setting goals that up your game.
• Developing your idea muscle.
• Three different ways to become wealthy: the artist, the manager and the entrepreneur.
• Why the best way to presell is asking for advice.
• The person that changed Dan’s life.
• Dan’s purpose of helping people and troubled children.
• And much more!

Tweetables:

“The world rewards courageous decisions.” — @danmartell

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[0:15:12].0]

“The basis of great entrepreneurship is mentoring.” — @danmartell

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[0:18:05].0]

“Every entrepreneurial story is a great story because it never works out the way it was supposed to.” — @danmartell

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[0:27:20].0]

“You can’t be grateful and angry at the same time; you can’t do it. Can’t. Zero. Not possible.” — @danmartell

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[0:36:55].0]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Dan Martell — http://www.danmartell.com/

Dan on Twitter — https://twitter.com/danmartell

Dan on LinkedIn — https://ca.linkedin.com/in/dmartell

Clarity — https://clarity.fm/

Unbound Merino — unboundmerino.com (PROMO CODE: FAILON)

Portage — https://portage.ca/en/

Flowtown — https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/766900/

Spheric Technologies — http://spheric.ca/

500 Startups — https://500.co/

HTML — http://html.com/

Javascript — https://www.javascript.com/

ColdFusion — http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family.html

PHP — http://php.net/

Perl Script — https://www.perl.org/

Shark Tank — http://abc.go.com/shows/shark-tank

Dragons Den — http://www.cbc.ca/dragonsden/

Airbnb — https://www.airbnb.com/

VRBO — https://www.vrbo.com/

Meetup.com — https://www.meetup.com/

Run for The Cure — http://cibcrunforthecure.supportcbcf.com/

Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/

SEO — https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/

The Five Minute Journal — https://www.amazon.com/Five-Minute-Journal-Happier-Minutes/dp/0991846206/

Travis Kalanick — https://www.linkedin.com/in/traviskalanick/

Uber — https://www.uber.com/

Mark Zuckerberg — https://www.facebook.com/zuck

Warren Buffet — http://www.warrenbuffett.com/

WordPress — https://wordpress.com/

Paypal —https://www.paypal.com/

Youtube — https://www.youtube.com/

James Altucher — http://www.jamesaltucher.com/

Richard Branson — https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson

Groupon — https://www.groupon.com/

Intercom — https://www.intercom.com/

Dropbox — https://www.dropbox.com/

Jayson Gaignard — http://www.jaysongaignard.com/

Marc Ecko — http://www.ecko.com/

Tim Ferriss — https://fourhourworkweek.com/

Oprah — http://www.oprah.com/index.html

Block Geeks — https://blockgeeks.com/

Transcript Below

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EPISODE 023

“DM: You got to be a die hard passion about it, it can hurt people because when they start it, they did it because they’re passionate about it and then they realize it’s a job and then they’re like shit, this isn’t fun anymore, it’s like look, business is not the same as being a practitioner.”

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:17.6] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Fail on Podcast where we explore the hardships and obstacles today’s industry leaders face on their journey to the top of their fields, through careful insight and thoughtful conversation. By embracing failure, we’ll show you how to build momentum without being consumed by the result.

Now please welcome your host, Rob Nunnery.

[INTRO]

[0:00:43.5] RN: Hey there and welcome to the show that believes embracing failure and sharing your honest struggle is the only way to achieve your dreams, in a world that only likes to share successes, we dissect the struggle by talking to open, honest and vulnerable entrepreneurs and this is a platform for their stories and today’s story is a good one. It’s of Dan Martell, if you don’t know Dan.

Dan’s an award winning Canadian entrepreneur and has exited three different venture backed startups. His most recent being Clarity which is acquired by startups.co. In 2012, he was named Canada’s top angel investor having completed over 33 investments with companies like Udemy, Intercom and Unbounce. We’ll be discussing how he got a start in business and why actually being in jail led to a completely new perspective on life.

The two magical questions to ask people that will make networking effortless and the one simple exercise to take to get out of a rut when you are feeling down and obviously much more. But first, I haven’t been traveling as much as I typically do lately but it hasn’t stopped me from wearing my new favorite shirt.

It’s a shirt from an awesome Toronto company called Unbound Marino. They have clothes and apparel made out of Marino wool and get this, you can wear them for months on end without ever needing to have it washed. Yes, I said that. This is a traveler’s absolute dream, it’s a guy’s absolute dream and it will turn you into a minimalist really quickly.

You’ll never have to check a bag at the airport again, but we’ll have a promo code for you on the show notes page for an exclusive fail on discount that you won’t be able to get anywhere else so make sure to check that out. That will be at failon.com/023 and moving right along.

If you’d like to stay up to date on all the Fail On podcast, interviews and key takeaways from each guest, simply go to failon.com and signup for our newsletter at the bottom of the page, that’s failon.com.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:02:34.4] RN: So, sitting down here with Mr. Dan Martell. We are in Carmel, California.

[0:02:40.4] DM: Beautiful outside.

[0:02:42.1] RN: We’re sitting on the patio, we’re sitting on my patio from my room, looking out, beautiful setting of rolling hills.

[0:02:49.3] DM: It’s California.

[0:02:51.4] RN: this is it man, you came in from – you’re back in Canada now?

[0:02:53.2] DM: East coast, yeah. Or back – last time I saw you was in San Diego and then I spent the winter there, head back east and then this is about the time of year where things get really magical there.

[0:03:05.0] RN: Yeah, this is like, all the Canada friends are like, this is cottage time.

[0:03:10.2] DM: Yeah.

[0:03:10.5] RN: Cottage life.

[0:03:11.7] DM: It’s good, there’s a few months a year and then the rest of it you run away.

[0:03:14.2] RN: You go to Carlsbad.

[0:03:15.5] DM: Yeah.

[0:03:17.2] RN: Awesome, obviously, you have Clarity and Flowtown that you sold, I want to jump into all that stuff and I want to jump in to what you’re doing now with Danmartell.com but first, just for some context, let’s go way back to the first time that somebody actually gave you money in exchange for a product or service that you created?

[0:03:35.3] DM: Yeah, I will say, I’ll go to 17, I mean, when I was a kid, I used to rally the neighborhood kids to build tree forts and snow castles and charge other neighborhood kids that didn’t help out, 25 cents play. I guess, at a young age, you could say I was into real estate but I think the more interesting story is when I was 17, I went through a lot as a teenager.

I had a pretty colorful upbringing, short story is, I ended up in jail twice, rehab at 17, discovered programming through this book I found on java, programming and when I got out, that became my new addiction and the first thing I ever sold way –

My dad had a cottage, he used to rent for a few weeks out of the summer and he was just sick of answering the same phone calls all the time of like, “Yes, it’s free these weeks, no, we don’t allow,” you know what I mean?

Back in the day, before the internet, people had to call to get these same questions answered and he asked me, he’s like “Hey, could you build me these web pages” in 97/98 and just occurred to me that there could be other people like my dad.

I told him, it would cost him 200 bucks and he was like, “Why is it 200 bucks” and I’m like, “That’s how much it costs” and the truth was, I needed the servers because I want to build something a little bit more elaborate and first thing I ever sold, I got a tourism guide, I had built it for my dad, got a tourism, it’s called maritimevacation.ca, it was a vacation rental site which you’d think it would be a 10 billion dollar idea in today’s market but this is a few mistakes made along the way.

I took all the addresses and I didn’t even know anything, I...