What could you achieve if you weren’t afraid of being laughed at? Today I’m sitting down with author and speaker Steve Sims as he shares the secret to building community, establishing authority, and taking calculated risks to achieve new levels of success. Listen as Steve and I explore why being author is an opportunity for more things, learning to lean into your community, and how to accept the fact that there will be turmoil in order to achieve your goals.
For more than two decades, Steve Sims was the go-to contact for the wealthiest people on the planet. As the founder of the world’s leading experiential concierge firm, Sims utilized his talent for connecting with people’s passions and making things happen to develop a client list of the world’s rich and famous. He has also been a keynote speaker for Harvard, the Pentagon, Mastermind Talks, and the Entrepreneur Society of San Francisco. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, kids, dogs, and a lot of motorcycles. Go For Stupid: The Art of Achieving Ridiculous Goals is the follow-up to his first book, Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen.
Episode Transcript:
00:32
Now, here’s your host, Marcus Aurelius Anderson. I just received news that Steve Sim passed away recently. I’m releasing this episode of Acta Non Verba with him in tribute. Steve, I learned so much from you. It was an honor to share the stage with you. Rest in peace, my friend. Please enjoy this encore interview with the real life Wizard of Oz.
01:02
Steve Sims. Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words instead observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Our guest today is a legend. Sir Elton John has said about him, quote, Steve Sims defines what it means to live and be your authentic self, unquote. Singing on stage with your favorite rock star be serenaded by Andre Balaccelli in Florence.
01:30
Walking the red carpet with Sir Elton John. These are just a few of the highlights that Steve has been able to provide for his clients and he is delivered in spades. His first book, Blue Fishing is outstanding. His newest book absolutely delivers with practical and tactical information that you can utilize right now. His newest book is called Go for Stupid. What would you achieve if you weren’t afraid of being laughed at in this age of the gotcha culture? People are terrified to do anything that may get them laughed at. Steve Sim says, fuck that. the exact opposite. Steve.
01:59
I will get right into the meat of this. Thank you so much for being here. And we were talking about how we dive into these things. We write a book, you create speakeas, you create the distillery, you create all these things. And if people want to know more about you, they can actually text SIMS, S I M S three, three, seven, seven, seven. And that will get them to know more about what you’re doing. But checking you out on social media, obviously is important. And then going to get the book is important, but you were mentioning how the people don’t understand what a book is, what it entails.
02:29
what we’re trying to do with it. Can you explain kind of what we’re trying to do with this particular book and then how it’s a vehicle for these other things? Yeah. So for anyone out there that thinks you’re buying a castle and a house on the beach when you do a book, I hate to burst your bubble, but there has never been a millionaire author. Now people are going to shout at me and go, oh, don’t be stupid. know, James Patterson and obviously the most famous one, J.K. Rowling. J.K. never became a billionaire from her books.
02:58
She became a millionaire from selling the movie rights. So understand, being an author is a vehicle to something else. For me, I want to start a movement. I want to get people to dare to do stupid things. I want people to go for ridiculous. I want people to stop worrying about what their hair looks like today and have audacious goals that they can go for without fear of anyone laughing at them because quite simply, they can’t hear it.
03:26
So for me, doing the book is a vehicle for my movement, for my goalpost, for what I want to achieve. And anyone out there that’s thinking of writing a book, it ain’t going to get you a house on the beach, but it is going to start a movement, it is going to build a community. And that’s where the action of fun happens. is. And writing that book really forces us to figure out what’s important. Again, if I only had this one opportunity to talk to this person, you saying, listen, go for stupid. That’s exactly what people need to hear. If they hear nothing else from this podcast.
03:55
That’s the beginning, that’s the mantra, and that’s what drives them in the direction. Yeah, I hate writing a book. And most authors actually feel the same way. Writing a book is like getting a therapy session on you by you being checked out by Dr. You. It’s horrible. I’ve literally done chapters and then not being able to sleep at night going, oh my God, I spoke about this and how’s that going to be taken? A lot of people think it’s therapeutic. I think it’s invasive.
04:25
But again, you got to ask yourself first of all, what’s the point of writing a book? And if it’s to get rich from writing the book, yeah, doing the wrong thing. But you’ve really got to identify what is the journey you’re trying to get on by using that book as you said it, the vehicle to get you there. Yeah, absolutely. And what does that do? That leads to speaking events, that leads to speakeasies, that leads to coaching, that leads to your program, that leads to the distillery, all these things. And your distillery has incredible information. You have 16 steps.
04:53
to how to even get in contact with the people that you want to, whether it be a high-end client, whether it be creating these sort of movements. So I highly recommend people that do that. And you have a speakeasy, we were mentioning earlier that you can’t tell us everything about it, but you do have something up your sleeve as always. Can you give us a little titillation of what that is? Yeah, what you’ve also got to realize, and we’re talking to the authors out there, is that you’ve given birth and raised a beast.
05:20
And then once it leaves your front door, you no longer have control of it. How it’s perceived, how it’s read, how it’s interacted, how it’s actually taken. You’re out of the picture now. You’ve thrown it out there and it’s gone. When I released my first book, Bluefishing, I thought to myself, right, okay, this is going to be fun. I hope it helps people. There you go. That was it. That was as much as I thought. And then people were like, right, I’ve read the book.
05:50
How do I continue? How do I get bigger? How do I? And all of a sudden you realize that while you have no control over it anymore, you’ve still got to feed it. So we built the Sims Distillery, which is our online membership and community where we have lives and we have AMAs and we constantly kind of put information in there. If I do a stage gig, that goes in there. If I do a live video in the Speak Easy Facebook page.
06:16
That goes in. So we’re constantly building up this library that over four years has kind of really beefed out and it constantly gets added to. And on top of that, people are like, well, that’s great for, when I can’t get you, when I can’t get in front of you, when I can’t spend time with you, but when I can, what does that look like? And I didn’t know. And we’ve all been to events, we’ve all been to seminars, we’ve all been to
06:45
entrepreneurial events and it’s like, hey, it’s at the Mario. It starts at nine finishes at five. There’s a cocktail reception at six 30 till 10. And these are the five people that are going to speak. And I thought to myself, we’re getting all of that information, but it’s the wrong focus. You see you’re sitting there going, okay, I want to go to this event because Billy’s on at two o’clock and Mary’s on at 10. And yeah, there’s a cocktail reception, but that’s the wrong reason we’re there.
07:15
We’re there to grow our support group. We’re there to move around other dysfunctional creative entrepreneurs to build up our world of reliability and people that we can lean on. The speakers on stage hate to the icing. So I thought to myself, what if we reverse it? What if we get down to the crux of the problem? And I didn’t know this would work. This was four and a half years ago, I thought, eh.
07:43
I’m going to try something and if it works, I’ll do it again. If it doesn’t, I won’t. So I thought to myself, I’m not going to tell you anything, but I’m going to ask you a question. So I put up the location I was going to be. I told them it was $2,000 and I told them the date. Now, when I say location, the city, I’m not even telling you where you’re going. And I thought no one’s going to buy this. And we did. We started to get people buying it. And then I asked them the one question.
08:13
Marcus, what is your problem today that would really help if it was answered during a two-day event? You know, what would be the impact if you could get over that hurdle? What would be the growth? What would be the riches if you could remove that problem, that ceiling, that bottleneck, whatever it is, what is it? And so that’s what we started doing. We started asking people whenever they signed up, what’s your problem?
08:42
And they would be like, well, I need to know about advertising. I need to know about how I can keep doing it. Now there’s no tracking. You know, how do I speak on stage? How do I grow my reliability, my credibility, my audience, my community? How do I do all these things? And then we would answer those in a real quirky location. So that never in hotels, I’ve thrown them in the Tesla plant in Fremont. I’ve thrown them in a brothel in Reno.
09:08
I’ve thrown them in a studio in a kitchen studio, really weird kitchen studio in San Diego. I threw them in a music studio in Los Angeles, a recording studio in Austin, Texas, a loft in Nashville. So I’ve thrown them in all of these different kinds of quirky places and you all turn up, you don’t know what’s going on. You don’t know who’s going to be there. And that disruption in your mind.
09:36
allows you to disrupt what you’re going to do with the information given you. And we’ve been doing it for four and a half years. The last one we did was in Hollywood, really cool location, the Bourbon Room. And it’s actually a live music location that has got the original backdrop from Rock of Ages. And it was just a cool venue. We had people from Apple, we had Candice Nelson. She’s a great disruptor.
10:03
If you don’t know the name, you’ll certainly know what she disrupted. Have you ever heard of Sprinkles Cupcakes? Yeah, absolutely. She was the founder of Sprinkles Cupcakes. She said, why do they have to be cheap and horrible? Let’s make them gourmet and aspirational, so aspirational that you will want to gift a Sprinkles Cupcake. So she was dynamite. So she kicked it off. had Greg Reed. We had, as I say, John Blass from Apple. We had an Olympian on there, Jeff Spencer.
10:31
We had Nick Peterson on there from the Wolf Den on Crypto and NFT World. We had Barbara Lazaroff, who was the co-founder of Spargo and the person she married Wolfgang Puck and basically turned him into this mega superstar. So we had so many powerful people. Brandon Turner was up there. had so many. I’m scared I’m leaving people out. But we just had A-list rock stars. And here’s the thing. You had no idea they were turning up.
10:59
And it was in a weird funky place on Hollywood Boulevard and it did really, really well. can’t wait for the next one. I’ve already told you, I’m to go to something next year whenever you have it. And I love that idea, how you set the framework. So if we’ve ever moved, whenever you move, you accept the fact that there’s going to be turmoil. You don’t know where your razor is. You don’t know where the pots and pans are. You barely had your bed out. You’re just trying to find clothes for tomorrow. You kind of just accept that that’s going to be this chaos. But as you were saying that
11:28
being open to chaos creates this capacity to look for disruption or create disruption or just say, why the hell not? What would happen if I did this? What’s the worst thing that could happen? And so this is the idea for you to go for something stupid. didn’t know it was going to continue as long. We do three a year and they’ve been going for four and a half years now. And I have to be honest with you. I did one and I was like, well, that was fun. I wonder if anyone had come back. And they did. And then I did a third one. I’m like, hang on a minute. This is starting to get some traction.
11:56
When we started them, we started them off at 25 people, too small. And then we did them and we went up to 80 people, too big. So now we stop it at around 40, 45 people. And that’s a lovely size. It gives you enough people that when you leave the event, you’ve got this added group, this added support system around you. And so that’s our magic number now. We’ve been doing that number for like three years.
12:23
I’m really excited. The next one’s in late February. Where is it? Not telling you. You’ll have to go to simspeakeasy.com and find out all the huge amount of information that won’t be there about it. And you’ve got some great examples in the book of some stupid ideas from the past as examples. Can you give us one? Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to framework it for you. You see, the trouble is today, we think we’re in a today problem. We’re not.
12:51
We’ve just got better distribution of the problem today and more people can see it. And if they can see it, they need to do something about it. And that’s the reason behind the book. Let me play a little game with you for a second, Marcus. What do you drive? I drive a Mercedes. Mercedes. Okay. What Mercedes? A C-Class. Okay. C-Class Mercedes. Do you want a truck? No. Okay. Do you have an interest in a truck? I’ve driven trucks before, but I have another vehicle as well if I need it. But the Mercedes is the primary vehicle as it were. Would you sell your Mercedes for a truck? No.
13:22
Did you see Elon Musk’s unveiling of his Cybertruck? Absolutely. Oh, hang on a minute. You watched the unveiling of a vehicle, a truck, but you have no interest in a truck, but you still watched it. I did. All right. So in which case he gained the attention, not just of you, of the planet with something that was quite simply of no interest to you.
13:49
In today’s attention currency, he was banking it, wasn’t he? He had the attention of the planet with a product that most people didn’t have an interest in. And that night he opened up the online order book for a maximum amount of deposits and sold out all deposits before he’d even started building the facility that would manufacture that property. So let’s get this right. He got the attention of the planet.
14:19
He sold out every single opportunity to purchase one before it was even made. But what were the headlines in the newspaper the following day? That the glass didn’t work the way it was supposed to. The bulletproof glass was penetrated when someone threw a steel ball at it. And we openly ridiculed him. We openly laughed at him. We didn’t revere him for the fact that he had the attention of the planet.
14:48
We didn’t acknowledge the fact that he built a vehicle that looked like it was a cross between Star Trek, Star Wars and Mad Max. We didn’t acknowledge the fact that he sold out every single one of his products before he even went into manufacturing. Can you imagine selling out before you’ve even started building the first nut? It’s stupid. We didn’t acknowledge any of that. Instead, as society, we found one element to ridicule him.
15:19
And that’s the world we’re in. So that’s an example of how toxic we are in. And I looked in this book and I looked at the stupid things I had done working with a Vatican, working with Elton John, Andrea Bocelli. You want to go for a meal in Florence? I shut down an entire museum, set a table of six up at the feet of Michelangelo’s David, and then had Andrea Bocelli as dinner time entertainment because I wasn’t willing to go for what was achievable because what the fuck do you know what’s achievable?
15:48
I went for something stupid and I got it. And here’s the dumb thing. I get an automatic no for every question I don’t ask. So if I start asking ridiculous asks, there’s a high probability I’m going to get them purely and simply because I asked. And as I say, I went back in history and I thought to myself, because we know who the evil tyrant is today, it’s media. Every problem we have today,
16:18
is media. The media is the same as a shovel. I can dig a hole or I can hit you over the head with it. I can do many different things with that shovel. Media is nothing more than a platform. You know you can actually push the off button and not listen to that shit. You know you have the choice, but you want to sit there and go, media is the evil. It’s steering me. It’s dictating. It’s telling us what to think. Media is a distribution channel. And when I say media, I’m talking about
16:48
Instagram, adverts on the side of a bus, a newspaper article, a TV article, a podcast. Anywhere where someone can reflect their opinion is a point of media and a distribution channel. Today, if I fall over walking down Hollywood Boulevard this afternoon and you’re a dipshit and you video me doing it and you stick it up on TikTok, someone in Korea could be watching that three seconds later.
17:15
The danger with today is that distribution is faster. That’s the only problem. Everything that we have today is amplified because more people can see it. I went back in history and realized we were our souls back then as well. know, Henry Ford, people protested against Henry Ford for the development of a car. And as Henry said, if I had listened to the people, I’d have made a faster horse.
17:43
That’s the classic statement. They honestly looked at Walt Disney when he was designing the Epcot Center and it was nothing more than a field. They looked at him like he was crazy. And as Steve Jobs says, it’s the crazy people that may well achieve it. You see, the dumb thing is we revere Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson. We revere all of these people for the great things that they’ve done.
18:11
But we laugh at our buddy around the bar tonight when he starts talking to us about his business idea. And we’re like, are you stupid? You could never do that. And we dumbed down our friend’s potential of achievement. So in today’s world of this gotcha society, this cancel culture, of all the ways that we want to jeer and laugh at people, my book is here to change the way you think and go, hang on a minute, before you laugh at someone, maybe support.
18:42
Before you ridicule your mate with his business idea, challenge him with, hey, is that good enough? Is your dream big enough? And why do you think you can do it? That’s not a negative. Challenge his commitment to what he’s doing. We’re in a weird world. This is my final little soapbox moment. We’ve gone through COVID where we were screaming that we couldn’t connect with people. And it was the period of excuse.
19:10
How many people did you go, oh, I can’t get out and meet my mates and I can’t see my friends and I can’t go to the gym? When quite simply that fat ass wasn’t going to the gym before COVID. But now it’s an adequate excuse. And then during this period of COVID when we couldn’t connect, what did we start doing? We started arguing with each other. Me too, Asian hate, Black Lives Matter, politics, conspiracy, everything was a fucking conspiracy.
19:39
All of a sudden, all of these things are happening, but we’re in the gotcha society where we don’t want to look stupid by saying something, having it taken out of context and then having the majority of lemons out there canceling my career because I said something out of context. So there was all these conversations that we had to have, but we would rather sit back on our sofa with our hand down our pants and laugh at each other and jeer and avoid the conversation.
20:09
In today’s planet, fuck them. They don’t matter to you. Do what works for you. Go for stupid. Have goals, achieve them. And as Elon Musk once said to me, they will applaud, sorry, they will laugh just before they applaud. That’s what you want to be. love that. And it’s so true. Content without context creates conflict. And that’s exactly what’s going on. People are just taking this piece of this, this piece of this.
20:36
And they do it the other way with positive information. Like even if there’s something that you say that is just, again, go for Stu, but this is life-changing. But yet if there was something else that you had said that they don’t agree with, it’s like, well, everything that Sim says is just complete shit. Now it’s like, no, can’t you just take the wisdom from this now? You don’t have to agree with everything that he says, but fucking use this stuff. It’s going to help you right now. It’s going to help your business. It’s going to help your family and the planet if you can do that. So for all the people now that are looking for, especially entrepreneurs, the low hanging fruit is money.
21:05
How can they think of something that is stupid beyond that so that when they think way beyond that, it makes this smaller goal that much easier for them to attain. So the low hanging fruit is not money. Okay. I’m going to disagree with you for a start and everyone’s out there going, ah, it’s all right for you. You’ve got some. Whoa. Listen, when have you ever got slimmer by buying a diet book? When have you ever got richer by reading an article on investment? Never, never, never getting rich.
21:35
Getting slim, getting smarter is a byproduct of action. If you want the low hanging fruit of money, focus on relationships. That is something that you can’t order on Amazon. You can’t go on there and I’ll five relationships, deliver them tomorrow. Can’t be done. So you’ve got to focus on relationships. Now we spoke about it before that today we’re in an attention currency and Elon Musk has got it by the buckets.
22:03
Well, you’ve got to focus on is your relationships. If I lose all of my money tomorrow through a bad business deal, I can phone up people. I can knock on their door. I can come back to it because I’ve got those relationships. If I’ve got no relationship, hey, now I’m in a very fragile situation. I’m always terrified. And I’ve worked with many of them, people that win the lottery because all of a sudden they’ve got the money, but they’ve got no support system.
22:32
They’ve got no friends. got financial advisors. They’ve got accountants. They’ve got advisors coming out of the woodwork. And then Aunt Janie from Idaho that just suddenly appears as your favorite aunt. I look after them. They pop out of fucking woodwork. You’re still alone. Check out the amount of suicides there’s been through lottery winners. It’s terrifying. So the bottom line of it is you’ve got to focus on your relationships. Focus on your relationship capital.
23:01
Focus on providing value to those relationships. Invoice for the solution you provide. And that’ll look after your bank balance. Many years ago, I used to look at my bank balance. When I was a young kid, just like you, I’m calling you out and I may be wrong, but I’m daring, I’m right here. Do you remember when we grew up and we were kids and we wanted to be a millionaire? Do you remember that? And then you make your first million and you think,
23:30
I’m still poor. Your kids are at private school. If you make it a million bucks and you live in Manhattan, you’re living in a toilet. If you’ve got kids in private school, you’re fucked. The bottom line of it is that you think when you arrive at that moment, the skies will open and red carpets are everywhere and you’ll never go to the toilet again. You think the world’s going to change and it doesn’t.
23:57
And then you realize, hang on a minute, I’m focusing on the wrong thing. And that’s what happened with me. I was so focused on the money, literally every day watching my bank account. This came in, that’s going out. Why is that? Now I’m not saying don’t pay attention to it, but I’m saying you shouldn’t. And listen to me, I would make a lot of money and I’d get lazy and I wouldn’t take on any new deals. And then the money would go down.
24:25
because life eats at your bank account. And then my wife would go, hey, are you going to do any work? And I’d be like, shit, I’ve got to make some money. And then I would jump into the wrong relationships. See, my bank account would steer me. I was completely reactive to my bank account. The second I realized that, it needs to have attention paid to it, but just not by me, I became immune to what it was doing.
24:54
And I was able to look over here and go, well, okay, I don’t like that relationship. So I’m not working with you, but I do like you. I’m going to work with you. And here’s the thing. What is your mental state, your aura, your enthusiasm like when you’re having a conversation with a bad person? What’s it like? There’s just something repellent about them. You’re like, I don’t like the smell of them. I don’t like the intention behind this. I feel this is sleazy. They’re going to try to hand me a card or trying to pitch me on something right now.
25:23
And you hate it, don’t you? It drags you down, you’re negative. And then when you go to have a conversation a second time, you’re carrying that toxicity over to them going, is this going to be another shit conversation? But if you have a really cool conversation, you’re like me and you do, how energized are you? How eager are you to get into another conversation hoping you’re going to get as energized as you did from the last one? So when I started focusing on the relationships,
25:52
and not being wagged by the bank account, I suddenly found that I was having, and all of a sudden, all I wanted to do was to contact these people. I just wanted, hey, John, I haven’t spoken yet. I know we’re not doing any business, but love you, boy. What have you been up to? And nine times out of 10, they would be like, hey, it’s funny you should call Barry down the road needs something. I’m going to send him your what? Yes. me, look, he’s a friend of yours. You’re a friend of mine. All of a sudden things started growing. My wife,
26:21
This is truth. Cut me off my bank account, I think 12 years ago. I don’t know what is in my bank account. I don’t have the login details. I don’t have the face ID. I have not a clue. And I’m very, very, very happy for it because I’m not allowing for it to wag me. It’s almost like a vanity metric on social media. Like once you get to a point where you have enough to do what you need to do.
26:47
Why would you allow that to dictate? Like you said, why would I go into this relationship or conversation with somebody that I can’t stand in the first place? That’s a red flag. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. But you’ve got to realize what you’re good at and what you’re bad at. If you’re great at investment, keep an eye on the bank account. But I’m guessing that today we need to be focusing on relationships because as I say, and I’ll repeat it because it’s worth saying, you can’t order relationships on Amazon. And there’s a story that you’ve told. I would ask you to kind of revisit it for us.
27:16
about when you were first starting out, when you were a bricklayer and you were working, that was sort of the family business. And you remember looking down the line on a job site and your grandfather was there. Yeah. So I left school at the age of 15. I know that’s a big surprise for a lot of you out there. I was working on a building site with my dad. My dad’s brother was there. So my uncle was there. His kids were there and they were like three and eight years older than me. So one of them was just about to end being a teenager, like 19.
27:44
The other one was like 25 who thought he was the big boss of all of us and would bully us on a regular basis. And also my granddad was there that was like in his seventies. Now I was like 16 years old and I’m looking at this going, this is my family tree. I can literally see points of my life and it’s all on this bloody building site. And I froze and I went down to the tea hut in the morning and my granddad’s sitting in a corner just trying to get warm because
28:13
Now, big surprise, was raining in London and he soaked. And I just crawled up to him, passed all the other bricklayers, and I knelt down. There was nowhere for me to sit. And I knelt down in front of him and I went, Granddad, Granddad, did you think you’d be doing this when you were this old? I remember word for word what I asked and what I got. Now, my granddad was a massive, he was Hagrid. He was a huge mammoth of a man.
28:38
And I’m surprised I didn’t get smacked into Tuesday, because that was kind of a rude question to ask. But I asked him the question, he didn’t look at me, he just blew into his teeth, cooled it down before he sipped it. And he said, son, as I say, word for word, son, if you don’t quit today, you’ll be me tomorrow. I was like, shit. And literally the entire caravan of wet bricklayers went quiet. I couldn’t hear anything other than that.
29:08
mic drop. And I came out and I said to my dad, I said, I got to quit. I got to quit. Now, I can’t be granddad tomorrow. And it sounds very disrespectful to say that. He looked at me. And then behind me was granddad. He looked up at my granddad. They obviously made some kind of face contact. And he went, all right, you quit Friday. And so I had to work another like three days to finish.
29:34
But my granddad died shortly after that, I never ever got the chance to tell him the impact he had. So I’m pretty sure that I’m going to get up there. It’d be causing some shit in a bar up there, I’m sure. But we’ll have an old fashioned and I will say thank you to him at a time. But that was my igniter. That was the first pivot of many pivots that literally went get out. That was the first small hinge to move this big door. And even at 16, you had the self-awareness to realize that. I mean, you could have just
30:04
push it away like everybody else is doing, but we wouldn’t be having this conversation now if you didn’t. live on fear and a lot of people are kind of like, oh, know, fear stops you doing things. It does if that’s how you read it. You know, for me, the fear was in me being him. I was terrified that that was going to be me tomorrow. So fear drove me to get it. I didn’t know where I was going. A lot of people will be like, well, I’m not going to leave my job because I don’t know where the next job is.
30:33
And you’re reacting to fear the wrong way. So for me, actually a friend of mine, Joe Polish, he said to me, the definition of hell is to meet the man or woman you could have been. Now that’s a very eloquent way of putting it. I didn’t hear that until many, many years later, but that was the ethos of how I lived. was like, hang on a minute. I don’t want to be where I am. And even today, I’m living in Los Angeles. I’m up in the hills, you know, I’m very postcard pretty, you know.
31:01
My life’s good, my bike’s, my whiskey. I live well. Okay, let’s not mix it. But I don’t want to be in the exact same place today that I am in six months time. I want to have tried things. I want to have experienced things. I want to have failed on things and to go, whoa, okay, that didn’t work. Great. What can I do with that education? So my fear is actually being in the same position today, next year, five years, something like that.
31:30
That’s what terrifies me. That’s what drives me. And we build nobility around that sometimes if we don’t have money, if we don’t have means, we’re like, oh, but I don’t need that because all these rich people are miserable and they’re assholes and all this other stuff. it’s like, if you’re doing that, you’re literally just kind of creating your own prison in the process. Do you know what I love about that statement? How many rich people do they know? Exactly. They’re not qualified to have an opinion. They sit there and they go, rich people are assholes. When was the last fucking time you went to a cocktail party full of billionaires? You know?
31:59
You’re a fucking idiot. Yeah, and half of their friends are probably assholes anyway, no matter how much money they’re making. So come on, let’s be honest. Look, having money doesn’t remove the fact that you may be a prick. And I totally agree with you. I know some very, very, very wealthy pricks. I also know some incredibly wealthy people that do nothing more than impactful work. And they’re in a position now and they’re like, I need to make a change. I need to order.
32:26
I don’t like that. I’m not going to wait for the government to change the law. I’m not going to wait for the taxes to change. I’m not going to wait for someone else to help that person. I’m helping it. And the foundations and the trusts and the charities, you know, before you bitch at a rich people, understand that it’s the rich people that are actually helping most of us out. So, you know, wake up to that. It’s true. mean, as an entrepreneur, as a leader,
32:52
We make more of a change than any government will. Nobody’s going to come save us. Nobody’s going to make it easy for us. And when we sit here waiting for somebody to do it, what do we do? We hold back. We can’t think of something to go for stupid. We’re just like, I’m just going to wait here until next year or next quarter or next week. And it never comes. The daft thing is 15 % and I don’t know if this is an accurate statistic. I just made it up, but it’s pretty damn close enough. 15 % of the planet have the other 85 % working for it.
33:21
We are the creative disruptors. know, for Elon, Elon’s the one that came up with the vision. None of his 30,000 workforce came up with the vision of what he did. He can’t do it without them. But 85 % of the planet works for that 15%. However, most of those people are listening to the 85 % that can’t do it. So when you’re out there and you’re getting financial advice,
33:47
from the guy at the end of the bar that’s never got a job in his fucking life, or you’re listening to real estate advice from Aunt Judy that still rents her house. Where are you listening to this source? And when you’re on social and you put something on there that means something to you and some prick from Idaho suddenly turns, nothing against Idaho, I love you potatoes. But if some prick from somewhere turns around and says something nasty and you take offense,
34:17
It’s kind of your fault, you know, because you’re receiving it. Let it go. A friend of mine, yes, said to me years ago, said to me, be so successful you have haters. I get so much shit. And sometimes I’ll actually post it because I just find it humorous. You’ll have trolls or I remember when you were, you had something on social where it was you standing next to I think a donkey or something you were like.
34:41
This is me as the modern day entrepreneur imitating something that I don’t actually own. Like Lamborghini. An elephant. That’s what it was. Yeah. was an elephant. was in Thailand and they had this elephant on the side of the road like they do. And I took a photograph going, no, I don’t own this elephant. Like you don’t own that jet. Oh my God. You got so much hate from that. love that. to post that. I’m going to repost that today actually. Because that’s a funny one. was like the reason why they were so mad was because there was truth in it. was like, Holy shit. He just called me on my shit. He doesn’t even know where I’m at.
35:11
And yet here it is. So what is the next stupid thing that you’re looking towards that you were trying to go to the next level with? Oh, yeah. So my stupid goal is to create a movement. And I’m trying to run it under hashtag go for stupid. Wherever you live today, I want you to raise your standard. I couldn’t give a shit if you buy the book. I want you to raise your standards, raise your awareness, raise your goals. Okay.
35:40
Raise what you accept as a relationship. I want you to increase your goals, not for what you think is possible, not for what you think and achieve. Yeah, I want you to push yourself. I want you to go for stupid audacious goals. I want you to sit down and go, what would Elon do? What would Larry Page do? What would Richard Blanson do? And go for that. And I want you to dare to be different. And again, I want those people out. I want you to see people giggling at you, because when they’re giggling at you,
36:09
Yeah, now you’re doing something right. That should be the metric, right? If they’re not laughing at you or if they’re not saying, why the hell are you doing that? Then we’re not pushing hard enough. I absolutely agree. 100%. I love it. Steve, can we stay connected with you? Tell us about the number again. Tell us about the social media. The book is available everywhere, right? We can get on Amazon. Yeah. Absolutely. I’m really easy to find. I’m Steve D Sims everywhere. D for dashing and only one M in Sims. SteveDSims.com is my website, but you can find me on any way you consume your social.
36:38
at Steve D Sims, probably Instagram’s, I don’t know, probably where most people tend to follow me on, but, you can go for stupid.com and find out about the book itself and grab a copy then. if you’re going to grab that book, also grab the first book as well. I couldn’t recommend them both more for sure. Steve, thank you so much for your time. I look forward to shaking your hand in person soon. Stay stupid. See you pal. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.on actions, not words.
