Nic’s blog
I write about building businesses, failing and building a life, not a legacy.
Nik Rabinowitz - How to be a happy comedian and what to do about the ego
In this episode of the Curious Cult, I have a fantastic chat with Nik Rabinowitz about how he got into the world of comedy, his relationship with comparison to other comedians, and dealing with the ego.
Nik is a full-time stand-up comedian, a part-time sit-down comedian (thanks to Zoom and online comedy shows), a parent of three, and an all-round fascinating human.
Key take aways from the episode
Don’t write off unique skills - you don’t realise where they might lead you
When doing something that interests you, you might not know how the skills you are picking up could go somewhere exciting. Nik never realised he could be an entertainer by trade, telling his stories to an audience. Only when someone suggested he took to the stage, his career blew up.
Support goes a long way, but going against expectations can be surprisingly fulfilling
Even if those close to you don’t see the same vision as you, it’s still worth trying something that could change your life. Nik’s mother was “concerned” about his idea of moving into comedy after getting a degree in business. But he stuck with his vocation and is now ticking all the boxes of Ikigai.
Don’t let life happen to you - take the lessons and run with them
Life throws drama at us, it’s inevitable. But if you interrogate scenarios and change your perspective in life, you’ll get a lot more out of the circumstances - and grow from them.
Work through mental roadblocks - they won’t disappear unless you move them or move around them
“Nobody’s ever got talker’s block.” If you’re a writer and struggle to write - train against that. Just write through the writer’s block. If you’re creative and hit a mental roadblock - work through it. If you’re in another industry where you can get stuck in a lack of motivation - work through it. Motivation is just discipline that gets worked on.
Comparison is the thief of joy
If you constantly focus on getting to where someone else is, you’ll find yourself struggling for happiness. Self-work is far more important than trying to get someone else’s life.
Treat the ego like a monster - give it lots of space
Ego often gets in the way of critical, clear thinking and taking feedback positively. We tend to take things personally or completely disengage. Instead of trying to let the ego go, respect it, give it the space it needs and learn lessons with it and not against it.
To keep updated on Nik’s movements, catch him on LinkedIn, on Twitter and on Instagram. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it far and wide and let’s start changing the world with curiosity.
Vinny Lingham - Abundant Thinking for Entrepreneurs
In this episode, I chat with Vinny Lingham about his time spent working in a corporate career and how it acted as a stepping stone to entrepreneurship. With a hunger for knowledge and an appreciation for information, Vinny is a massive advocate for skill-building experience and it’s evident in the way he talks about work and career opportunities.
In this episode, I chat with Vinny Lingham about his time spent working in a corporate career and how it acted as a stepping stone to entrepreneurship. With a hunger for knowledge and an appreciation for information, Vinny is a massive advocate for skill-building experience and it’s evident in the way he talks about work and career opportunities.
Hailing from East London in South Africa, he spent time in the corporate world before branching out to start his own companies. After building his first businesses, a search engine marketing platform in 2003 and incubators in South Africa, he moved to Silicon Valley to build up more tech entrepreneur experience. In 2015, Vinny started Civic, an identity platform, which is his current focus to develop to adapt in the COVID-shaken world.
Aiming for knowledge over experience
Coming from debt, being cash-strapped, and having learnt through a year of failed attempts to start things, from franchising to working on his dad’s business to trying to build businesses.
“I made lots of mistakes back then, it was a difficult time… I did a whole bunch of things that all failed. I moved on. That was a lost year, but I learnt a lot. ”
To fund himself through a couple of difficult years, Vinny got a full-time corporate job. In his time working in corporate life, the most important thing he realised was how crucial it is to learn on the job. To work hard and gain lessons through dynamic data and changing information make the hours working for someone else worthwhile. If you’re working in a corporate company and hope to start your own business at some point, Vinny’s advice is to make sure you are gaining worthwhile insights from your experience:
“If you work in a business where it’s dynamic and things are changing and you’re learning new things every single day, you need to maximise those hours. You need to plough in as many hours as you can. If you work twice as hard as everyone else, you can learn twice as fast in a business where data is changing. If you can develop specialised skills in a certain area and you raise yourself, especially in a new industry that’s emerging, you become an expert, you can find a gap in the market and start your own business.”
It’s important to realise that having a “wealth of experience” is not a good representation of how much a person can offer. More often than not, this is one of the biggest fallacies which corporates companies often buy into: A candidate for a job requires X number of years, and they’ll rule out the perfect person because of “inexperience” despite the treasure chest of information they might have. As Vinny pointed out, this creates a niche gap in the market which means the knowledgeable job-seeker will tend towards starting a new company rather than fighting for a job.
The fallacy of the work-life balance
Too many people are ambitious but aren’t willing to work hard to achieve. There needs to be intention to work to align with the ambition for results. And the two need to work together. You can’t only work smart and you can’t only work hard. If you try to balance your work and career and your leisure and your life at 50/50, you don't really give either enough they need. But if you can integrate both your work and your life, letting each other feed, then they can complement one another.
“If you’re trying to create wealth, then you can’t have a work-life balance because the opportunities that present itself don’t care about your life.”
The scarcity vs abundance mindset
Growing up in South Africa makes one guarded about losing something, which leads to a “scarcity mindset” and a conservative fear to mitigate risk. In developed economies, on the other hand, there seems to be a more prominent “abundant mindset”, where there is not the same drive to cling on to something out of fear of losing it.
“If I could go back in time and change one thing, I would have done differently is I would have moved away from South Africa earlier to adjust [and adopt an abundance mindset].”
On this point, Vinny noted that to combat issues of scarcity mindset means keeping overheads low, and take calculated risks, while reducing expenses to combat possible loss. Be frugal to be abundant and maintain cash-flow. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, to be abundant, there needs to be an element of constraint.
To young startup founders: Just take the damn advice
In closing, Vinny offered a key piece of guidance:
Learn from the mistakes others have made already. The advice hasn’t changed over years and learning through your own mistakes when you can avoid them makes for unnecessary use of time, energy, love and money.
“I got all the advice I could have got. I just didn’t listen. Listen to people who have been there and done it. Don’t mistake the same mistakes they made and listen to what they have to say.”
Mike Joubert - Moving from Corporate to Entrepreneurship
In this episode, I chat with Mike Joubert who has had a thirty-year corporate career working with brands across the world. After moving from corporate to entrepreneurship, Mike started and sold his own successful business in 2009. From there, with the love of developing companies and people, he has spent his time investing in businesses in South Africa.
In this episode, I chat with Mike Joubert who has had a thirty-year corporate career working with brands across the world. After moving from corporate to entrepreneurship, Mike started and sold his own successful business in 2009. From there, with the love of developing companies and people, he has spent his time investing in businesses in South Africa.
From overcoming the fear of moving abroad, having the courage to turn curiosity into experimentation in the corporate companies, and starting his own business with amazing success, Mike has a wealth of business experience.
Combatting the fear of Starting Something and growing from it
During his early career, twice Mike was offered the chance to move abroad to head up teams in Amsterdam and the United Kingdom and twice he turned the opportunity down. He pegged the reason down to one thing: He was too nervous to leave his family and support and step out into the unknown. The people he knew and loved were based in South Africa, and he was concerned about the move from comfort. When the third chance to move and work overseas came from Levi’s, he couldn’t say no.
“I had the same doubts, but I thought that I was not going to get a fourth chance. I made the leap, and you know what, it turned out spectacularly. Not only was it a great opportunity and added some real value to the business but as a human being, I just grew.”
With no network, no perception, and no support, a person has to start afresh when making the move to another country. It’s a leap that is more common than expected when starting something, but it grows a person unbelievably quickly when the stakes are that much higher.
Money is money - it’s not about how much, it’s about what you do with it
At the time, the marketing budget for Levi’s for Europe was massive (as in, $94 million dollars massive). On reflection, Mike said that working with such an enormous budget and the perceived pressure of it taught him two things:
“The importance of being able to lead with both instinct and skill and secondly, whether you are working with R1 or R1 million, money is money. It’s not the quantum of the money that makes sense, it’s what you do with it.”
Experimenting takes courage but the results are proof in the pudding
Mike describes how he took some time to understand the variables in the corporate culture in Europe before making big decisions. Out of three major disruptive decisions he made, two worked out fantastically and one fell flat.
The leadership of innovation and disruptive thinking took some time for the European business minds to adjust to, but as soon as the results started coming in, the more innovation and experiment-thinking was accepted.
Young startups often compare themselves to an established competitor and try and follow. Mike’s experience with Levi’s shows that thinking happens at a high level too. The big guys are as clueless as startups. It often takes going back to the nugget of original thinking to get back to the point of success, not swaying to external factors.
“Once you believe in something, you need to consistently bang that drum. Don’t kowtow, don’t bend. With entrepreneurship, though, you are essentially your own master.”
As an entrepreneur, it’s up to you to build the business the way you want to and to put the work in to not follow the competitors and the crowds.
The mindset in mentorship & power of consistent messaging
Mike, with the insight of his own relationship with his own mentor Dr Anton Rupert, describes the difference between sponsorship and mentorship as this:
“A sponsor I would see as someone who believes in you and backs you, either financially or through open stores and takes his or her network to open doors. But a mentorship is a much more intimate relationship. As a mentor, you provide context and variables so that the mentee can take the information and make decisions themselves.”
One of the most important things from his time with Dr Rupert is not necessarily what was said in their conversations which lasted hours, but how he made him feel. Mike explained that one of the most important things he learnt was how consistent he was in his messages. It wasn’t about saying the same thing again and again, but having a consistent idea and threading it through all aspects of life and conversation.
Zev Siegl, Starbucks Co-Founder - Ep 07 of the Curious Cult Show
Zev Siegl
Zev Siegl is obsessed with small businesses around the world. He spends his days travelling and consulting to startups to help them thrive and survive. Aside from this obsession, Zev Co-Founded one of the worlds most known brands, Starbucks.
In this episode, I talk with Zev about Starbucks, how they came to the name and if they knew that they were creating a world-conquering brand as they were building it.
We also discuss Zev’s definition of innovation as insightful, adaptive reuse of a collection of ideas and thoughts combined in a new way to solve interesting problems.
Greg Smithies - Ep 06 of the Curious Cult Show
Greg Smithies and I have a long-standing online friendship. He’s called me out on LinkedIn in when I talk shit. He’s helped me meet investors when trying to raise funding and we’ve had some very interesting debates and conversations over the years.
Greg is a talented venture capitalist, CFO and startup-spotter. He has worked with Elon Musk at The Boring Co and has invested in some of the most innovative businesses in the world.
At present Greg is looking for trillion dollar businesses to invest in. That’s a business with the entire world as an addressable market.
In this episode I talk with Greg about growing up in South Africa and taking his skills to a global market. How one finds a trillion dollar business and how, exactly, he manages to stay in front of his curiosity. SPOLIER: He believes in a bit of balance and prefers founders who can actually live a relatively normal life.
Mmusi Maimane on The Curious Cult Podcast, Ep 02
Curiosity comes from many different places, especially so for South African politician, activist and theologian, Mmusi Maimane. Mmusi and I discuss how he engages his own curiosity, how he keeps his curious as they develop and where his curiosity stems from.
This fantastic episode is now live, listen above!
Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast, rate, review and share share share!
The Curious Cult Show - Episode 1: Trip Hawkins, Electronic Arts Founder
I have been playing video games since I can remember. I owned Pong. I owned the earliest Nintendo. I played Sonic the Hedgehog and just like hundreds of millions of other people I have spent many, many hours playing games produced by Electronic Arts.
Fortunately, I have been lucky enough to talk with Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts for the very first episode of my newest podcast, The Curious Cult Show.
In this show I talk to interesting people about their obsessive curiosities.
Trip was kind enough to talk to me about his obsession with Dungeons and Dragons and how it led him down the path of creating a business plan at the age of 12 to build out what would become Electronic Arts.
Here’s the podcast:
Trip Hawkins, Electron Arts founder.
IT’S ALIVE! The Curious Cult Show Podcast Launches
For a long time, I have enjoyed talking to smart people about interesting things. My background, aside from building businesses, is actually journalism and I love interviewing people to extract their genius for others to hear.
This year I decided that I was going to start writing my next book. The topic of the book is curiosity and more specifically how curiosity leads to innovation in the workplace.
So I set out to interview some of the most interesting people I could find.
I’m really excited about The Curious Cult Podcast. Each episode features a person that I wanted to speak to and each episode also serves as research for the book which is coming out in February 2021.
In the first episode, I talk to the founder of Electronic Arts, Trip Hawkins about his curiosity and how it led the creation of one of the largest gaming empires in the world.
Head over to my podcast page and subscribe using your favourite platform.
The show is available on all the major platforms and I’ll be launching a new episode every week for the foreseeable future.
A shameless punt: if you listen to and like the episodes that are available, please leave a rating and review on iTunes, Spotify or anywhere else you can!