3 embarrassing moments that changed my life

All right. Today, I'm gonna talk about some embarrassing stories that happened to me. These are three moments where I felt that sting of embarrassment, but something changed in me because it was, it was so painful. Uh, as they say, sometimes the wound becomes the door.

[singing] I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. Uh, I put my all in it like no days off. On the road less traveled, never looking back.

If I had to give myself one life mission, it was avoid embarrassment. [laughs] I think in every social situation, I am fundamentally, at some level, just actively trying to avoid embarrassment, probably even more than trying to avoid, like, pain and death. Because I don't even think about those, but I definitely think about ways I could be embarrassed. And yet, embarrassment seems to find me, and it finds me, you know, somewhat often. And, uh, and, you know, there, there is an upside to the embarrassment. After the, the sting wears off and the pain is gone, there is usually some sort of learning, some sort of growth, some sort of benefit. But even knowing that, I don't go look for embarrassment. I still actively try to avoid it, and I'm sure you do, too. So the first story, the last thing you wanna do as a founder is build something that nobody wants. You might dedicate years of your life just building, building, building, only to find out at the end that nobody even wanted the thing in the first place. The better way is to validate your idea as you go. Earlier, the better. So the team over at Starter Story, which is part of HubSpot, has made a guide for validating business ideas. It's templates and case studies to learn how to validate an idea and how to start, uh, doing that before you build too much, and it shows you how the best founders test their ideas before wasting months building the wrong thing. You can get the guide for free. You can scan the QR code on the screen or click the link in the description below. All right, back to the episode. I recently sold a company and made more money than I've ever made in my life, and with that gain comes the obnoxious problems that nobody wants to hear about, where you're just sorta like, "Uh, I don't know what to do anymore." And so I hired this coach, this, uh, sort of like life direction coach, and he has me take a personality test at the beginning. And he tells me, "This personality test is gonna be kinda weird. It's not like a normal one." But he's like, "Don't worry. Just answer all the questions." So I'm answering all these questions. Some are about work, some are about personal life, some are about relationships. I answer all these questions. I thought it was pretty straightforward, pretty easy, and I try to answer them as honestly as possible. A few weeks later, he says, "You wanna see the results of that test?" "Yeah, absolutely." And he pulls up this slide. Like, there's, like, all these categories, and I have low scores on all these categories. And there's one score where I'm off the charts, and I squint, and I lean in to zoom to see what it is. And it just says narcissism. [laughs] I had, no joke, one hundred and ten on the scale. It was over a hundred on