There are very few people who have worked as successfully across as many industries as Jay Samit has, and he wanted to share that knowledge and help people on their journey. That is why he wrote the bestseller Disrupt You, Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovations. Throughout this book, Jay explores the importance of personal disruption. “You really have to say, what is limiting you in this limitless world? My mom had forged my birth certificate and put me in school a year early. I was always the smallest and the scrawniest, therefore I hated sports. As a grown up at 40, I had no interests in sports; followed none; played none; knew nothing about them, because at 4 and 5, I hated it. How silly is that? At 40, I finally disrupted myself and said I will learn to master a sport” Jay writes.
Since he always wanted to be a circus performer, he took up the trapeze. There was nothing more terrifying than the first time he jumped off without a net and there’s nothing more exhilarating than surviving. Having tackled his limitations, he realized that success is about lifelong learning. Jay refers to self-disruption as akin to plastic surgery, except you hold the scalpel. If you can really be honest with yourself you suddenly start seeing where you have tremendous assets and where you need to hire. No one created the billion-dollar company by themselves. Until you realize what skills you need to add to the team, you won’t get there.
In Disrupt You Samit says the first thing to really do, is to look at yourself and figure out what makes you unique. The easiest way to success is if you’re the best in world at what you do, or the only one doing it. The next most important thing to realize in your journey is you don’t need to know all the steps. As Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and for PayPal, has an expression that Jay loves “An entrepreneur is somebody that jumps off the cliff and assembles the plane on the way down.” This book is also great for anybody who’s in school. It’s like a textbook for entrepreneurialism. In fact, Rutgers and Temple University have it on their curriculum for their fall semester already.
Samit reminds us that we need to create an atmosphere that encourages risk taking. If you’re afraid to take a risk and make mistakes you’ll never innovate, you’ll never grow a business and you’ll never be competitive. Jay tells the story of how the creators of a failed video dating site changed its name to YouTube and sold it for 2 billion dollars!
We live in what is an era of endless innovation, and Samit points out that the speed of change is such that your advantage on a product is for a very short period of time, so you have to be willing to cannibalize your own business. Whatever you’re making your profits from today will not be what you’re making your profits from five years from now. Too many companies fight last year’s war. Jay relates Amazon’s Jeff Bezos progression from books to cds, and how one of the things that he did was open up so that any employee could come up with a good idea.” Can you imagine in any other company, the head of IT saying, “You know, boss, we worked really hard on making this cloud of ours secure and solid. We could just add on a whole bunch more racks and do this for other companies and turn IT into a profit
One fantasy Jay hopes to get to see in the next five years is the self-driving motor home. It’ll change travel and bring back domestic travel, the old Route-66. The idea that you get in your car and the adventure begins. Entertainment, movies, great meals and it just stops and says, “Yellowstone.” Just a whole different way for families to connect for vacations to begin the moment you leave your driveway. In addition, he’s also super excited about 3d printing, and how it will be applied across a whole bunch of different areas. However, there’s no single area that has his attention. He wishes he could have a thousand lives to pursue them all!
To your best success,
Kelli Richards, CEO of the All Access Group, LLC
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