The $50,000-Per-Day Lie You Tell Yourself

What if the line I'm not ready yet is costing you $50,000 every single day? Let me tell you a story. J. Childry was 32 when he discovered this is the most expensive lie that we tell ourselves. It's 1996. He's an executive at IQ Software in Atlanta. He's a six-figure salary. Wife has a stable job at Bell South. They have a new baby. Basically, immigrant dream achieved, right? They came from nothing. They came here. They built a life. His parents were small-scale farmers from a village in India with no electricity. They couldn't even comprehend the amount of money he was making. And then, a little company called NetSweet went public. And I bet most of you don't even know what NetSweet is. But NetSweet was a company that Mark and Dreson of Andreson Horowitz took public and it made him $171 million in 16 months when he was 24 years old. Now, Childry couldn't stop thinking about it. If Mark and Dreson could start a company, he was a young guy right out of college. Why shouldn't I? But it was one problem. One reasonable, rational, responsible problem that everybody would have understood. He wasn't ready. He had no entrepreneurial background. He had no investor connections. He had no safety net. He had $500,000. That's fair amount of money in life savings. But basically, that represented everything that he and his wife had worked for. So, any rational person would wait. Would save more, would learn more, and prepare more. But that's exactly what Childry didn't do. So, Childry did something that changed the trajectory of his life. He didn't calculate how much he could lose. He calculated how much waiting would cost. Childry sat down with his wife, JOT1, evening. She had her own stable job at Bell South. They really had everything to lose at this point, because they didn't really have a lot of money. He'd be working very hard to get to the point where he was at that point. But instead of listing what they would lose, if they failed, they both asked a very different question. What does every year of waiting actually cost us? And they did the math. So, year one of waiting and not starting a company would be one year less to learn from failure. One year less to build connections. One year less of compound growth. Now, year five of waiting, well, that would be five iterations. They'll never get to try. That would be five pivots that they'll never get to make. And that would be five years of customers that they'll never serve. And by year 10, well, by year 10, someone else will have built their idea. The opportunity will be gone. They'll be 42 instead of 32 with less energy, more obligations, and less risk tolerance. So, childry asked the question that changed everything for them. Okay, now we know what happens if we don't do it. Can we get jobs again if this company fails? And of course, they looked at each other like, obviously you could. And then he asked another question, well, can we make this $500,000 back? And the answer also is yes. It might take years, but yes. But, and the third question he asked was, can we get back the time we're about to waste by not doing it? And that just shook them to their core. They sat both of them at that table in silence. They realized that money is renewable and time isn't. They both quit their jobs in next week. They dumped their entire $500,000 life savings into a company called Secure IT. And the timing seemed insane because at the time, less than 5% of Fortune 500 companies even had firewalls let alone a need for an IT company or a security company. They were solving a problem that didn't even exist yet. And for two years, they really struggled. Customers didn't understand what they were selling. Cybersecurity didn't make sense at the time. Everyone's files were in filing cabinets, not in the cloud on the internet. But then the dot-com boom hit. And then every single company suddenly needed security. And in 18 months, Secure IT, their company, went from near death to a $70 million acquisition by vericine. Now, mission accomplished, right? Most people would stop there. But they just did that same exercise again. And Chowdry immediately started another company. Then another, and another. He started air defense. He started Cypher Trust, which sold for $273 million. He started Core Harbor. And finally, in 2007, at age 43, he started Zscaler, betting $50 million of his own money when everyone said cloud security was impossible. And today, Zscaler generates $1.6 billion in annual revenue and J. Chowdry's net worth is $11.5 billion. But here's what matters. If he had waited even one more year to start Secure IT, none of this would exist. Now, after his success, so present day, researchers wanted to understand what made him different, what made entrepreneurs different. So MIT studied 10,000 entrepreneurs over 20 years. And they expected to find that successful entrepreneurs had better ideas, more experience, or more capital. Wasn't any of that. They found something that nobody expected. The single biggest predictor of success wasn't any of these things. It was age at first attempt. Not because younger founders are smarter. It's actually the opposite. The average age of a successful startup founder is 45. But the twist is that those 45-year-old success stories, they all started their first company, even if it was a failure in their early 30s. Pattern is universal. First company at 32, average of 3.7 attempts before major success. If first company is at 40, an average of 1.9 attempts before success, and if the first company is at 50, an average of 0.8 attempts. You heard that right. Starting later means fewer failures because you run out of time for multiple attempts. But the likelihood of you getting a major success, well, it's just not as likely. So the biggest predictor of entrepreneur success is how young the founder is when they start their first company. Stanford's Catherine Shaw, another researcher. She spent a decade studying this paradox. Now, her conclusion was basically that every year you delay starting, reduces your lifetime entrepreneurial earnings by 12 to 15%. Chaudry's a perfect example. He didn't just build one company. He built five. Each failure taught him something. Each success funded the next attempt. So if he'd waited until he was 40 to start, it doesn't mean he wouldn't be successful. Maybe he would have built two companies. Maybe one. And that could be potentially $11 billion in value that almost didn't exist because he almost waited. Now, one of my favorite quotes from J. Chaudry is if you won't bet 100% of your savings, you don't have 100% conviction. Keep learning until you do. Now, this may sound reckless until you understand what he actually means. He's not saying throw money at half baked ideas. He's saying that most people use the I need to learn more as an excuse to avoid starting. Columbia Business School actually tracked 5,000 people who said they wanted to start a business quote-unquote someday. And after 10 years, 92% were still preparing. 6% had started and failed. 2% had started and succeeded. But the kicker is that when they interviewed the 92% who never started, they all said the same thing even 10 years later. I'm still not ready. When they interviewed the 8% who started both failures and successes, they also said the same thing. I wasn't ready when I started. But the difference is that the starters knew a secret that the waiting people didn't. Nobody is ever ready. Readiness is this lie that we tell ourselves to avoid the discomfort of beginning. An economist at the University of Chicago found something even more interesting. So entrepreneurs who not only started but invested their own money are three times more likely to succeed than those who raise venture capital. And it's not because they're smarter because skin and the game changes everything. When it's your money, every customer matters, every decision matters, every day matters. You can't afford to figure it out later. You figure it out now or you don't do it. And if you don't do it, you're going to die with regret. And that pressure, the desperate need to survive. That's not a bug, that's a feature. Now, after looking at childry's approach, let's go through a framework that you can use to understand what the cost is of waiting, the cost of you not taking action and whatever it is you want to do. I want you to go through this exercise because it will make it painful and real. And hopefully that will be enough to get you off your ass to do the thing that you're destined to do. Now, when somebody is planning on taking a big leap, usually in their business or in their career or they want to leave their job and start a company, there's a calculation they do. Most people calculate what will I lose if I fail? What childry did and what winners do is they calculate what will I lose if I wait? Very big difference. So the first step is to understand that every year you wait, you lose 365 days of customer feedback, of market learning, of skill development, and of network building, okay? So you can actually do the math. Years that you wait and just plan and not actually execute times 365 is days, that equals your days of lost experience. Step two, you have to understand that startups pivot an average of 2.3 times before finding product market fit and each pivot takes six to nine months. So you do the math. It would be years of delay times either 1.5 or two. What that equals is the amount of pivots that you'll never get to try and remember. Each pivot is required to find that product market fit. Step three, you have to understand that you miss out on compound opportunities. So early customers become evangelists, early employees, become leaders, early mistakes, become wisdom, and companies that start earlier generate more value. Not because they're better, because they have more time to compound. More customers speak to their friends about the product. More employees grow up in the company. You learn more things that didn't work so you can focus on the things that do. But there's a ton of compound opportunity lost by not starting. Step four, this is actually Childry's key insight. This is the conversation he had with himself. You ask yourself, can you replace what you're risking? So can you replace your money? Yes, it can be earned back. Can you replace your status? Yes, it can be rebuilt. Can you replace your time? No, it is gone forever. So understand that there is a difference between the years required to replace the things that you lose like money and status versus the years that are actually lost by waiting. And lastly, you have to understand that if you are trying to figure out if you're ready to start. You've gone through this sort of mental thought experiment. You realize that you're going to miss out on all this customer feedback and market learning. You're going to realize you're going to miss out on opportunities to pivot. You realize you're going to miss out on compound advantages. And you're going to realize that you're literally just going to miss out on time. You're going to lose time. You can never get back. You're going to say, well, I'm not sure if I'm ready. But doesn't matter what level of ready you are, you're never going to be 100%. If you are trying to wait to be 100% ready, you will just never start. So I don't care if you are 20, 30, 40, 50, 60% ready. You have to start. And actually, there's studies that show that people who start at 60% readiness means they've kind of got their stuff figured out. They actually have the same success rate as those who started at 90%. And that's really because that last 40% of prep, it's not prep. It's just procrastination. You're just lying to yourself saying, I'm not ready enough. I don't have enough information. You're never going to have enough information. You get the information when you start taking action, when you start moving forward, when you start building. So remember at the beginning of this podcast, I said that you may be losing up to $50,000 every single day by saying that you are not ready to start your business or start the thing that you want to start. Let me show you how I came to that number. So, Chaudry's net worth is 11.5 billion. It was 29 years as he started his first company. That means he created $396 million of value every single year. That means he created $1.08 million of value every single day. But he almost waited one more year to get ready. And that one year of waiting would have cost him $396 million in compound value. Again, divided by 365 days, that is $1.08 million per day. But you're not, Chaudry, that's fine. So let's be conservative. Let's say you're not a billionaire. Let's say you built something worth 120th of what he built. That is still $50,000 per day compounded value over a period of time. So every day you wait, every day you prepare, every day you tell yourself that you're not ready. That is $50,000 gone forever. While you're reading another book, you're taking another course, you're waiting for a perfect moment. You wake up, you go to bed, $50,000. If you build a fraction of what Jake Chaudry built. And right now in your head, you're listening to this podcast and you're calculating the reasons why your situation is different, right? You have a mortgage, you have kids in school, you have good health insurance. How did we had all of that? Plus, he had immigrant parents who thought he was insane for leaving a stable job. You're gonna come up with all these excuses like you need more savings and you need more experience, you need more connections. Well, Chaudry had $500,000. And if that sounds like a lot, remember it was everything. So every penny, no backup, no second chances. Maybe your excuses that you're waiting for the economy to improve or for the right idea or for the perfect timing. Well, keep in mind that when Chaudry started his first company, cybersecurity, IT security, didn't even exist, the market didn't exist. And then when it did exist, when there was the dot-com boom, well, then the market was saturated and people would have said the opportunity was gone. So you'll never win, you'll never be ready. You'll never have enough savings, you'll never have enough experience. The timing will never be right. You just gotta move, you gotta take action, you gotta do it. See, the cost of starting isn't what you'll lose if you fail. The cost of waiting is what you'll lose if you don't try. See, one is temporary, one is very permanent. One you can recover from, one you can't. Just ask yourself, what's the worst that can happen? If you lose everything and you have to get jobs again, can you do that? The answer's gonna be yes. And then just start. So Chaudry had that conversation. A conversation took five minutes. It made him $11.5 billion. Conversation that you're having with yourself has been going on for years and it's costing you millions and it's costing you more every second you don't act. So understand that this framework, this playbook is very simple. Calculate what the waiting costs are, not the starting costs. Realize you can replace money but not time, except that you're never gonna be ready enough. Start before you're ready and figure it out as you go. Chaudry wasn't ready, nobody ever is, you won't be. The difference between him and you is encouraged. It's math. You calculated the cost of waiting. See, you're still calculating the cost of starting. One calculation creates billions. The other one creates regrets. Just choose. But choose now.