Flat broke, owning no car or furnishings, he crashed at the ant‐infested apartment of two welfare recipients. Still, Vin refused to give up. What sealed the deal for me that Vin was the one was a story he told me of a hack that worked back in England for a new pub.
With over 7,000 pubs in London, generating buzz around a new one opening is quite the task. As the UK's capital, most forms of advertising in the City are prohibitively expensive. With London's rents being notoriously high, a new night spot has to quickly build a clientele or it will go out of business. In my opinion, the solution he came up with was pure genius. He maximized both his profit and the pub's success without spending a cent.
There was no need to buy any social media ads, shoot any glitzy photos, or target Google users. Instead of thinking about the problem from the pub's point of view, he innately focused on the potential customer's journey. How and why do people go to pubs? Who do they go with, and where do they meet those people? From this out‐of‐the‐box thinking, the solution revealed itself. Instead of going on social media sites where people hung out with friends, the campaign created fake profiles on Tinder. Using appropriated photos of hot guys and girls, these “singles” would get a lot of swipes. Once connected, they were let in on the ruse.
“I'm not real, but if you want to find real people like me, check out the action at our new pub.” The campaign spoke to the moment and was authentic to how people live their lives. Everyone was in on the joke and shared it with their friends. Soon, the press was writing about the hack and the place was packed. Vin innately understood how to think like a disruptor, or, in his parlance, a hacker.
If I was going to put my entire reputation on the line with the Future Proofing You experiment, I needed to make sure that Vin had a growth mindset from day one and believed that he could become a self‐made millionaire in a year. So, I used a technique discovered by University of California Riverside professor of psychology Richard Rosenthal. What Rosenthal studied was the effects of self‐fulfilling prophecies on student performance. At the beginning of the school year, all the students at an elementary school were given an IQ test, and based on the results, their teachers were told by Rosenthal that certain students were “intellectual bloomers.” These students would likely substantially excel in the coming school year. The professor lied. The truth was that the bloomers were chosen completely at random and had no greater intelligence than the rest of their classmates. Rosenthal wanted to see what the effect of teachers believing certain students were special would have on the children's intellectual growth and performance. At the end of the year, first‐ and second‐grade “bloomers” showed a statistically significant mean gain in IQ scores. Just by saying a student was smarter made her smarter. Now known as the Pygmalion Effect, this creates a virtuous cycle of change and a self‐fulfilling prophecy.
In selecting Vin Clancy for my Future Proofing You experiment, I counted on the Pygmalion Effect to improve our odds of achieving success. From the outset, I let Vin know that I had interviewed many candidates and, of all the potential mentees, he had impressed me the most as having the skills, drive, and intellect to be a millionaire. Vin internalized my praise and immediately got excited about how he was going to focus all his energy on making a million dollars. After our initial interview, Vin stayed behind at the restaurant where we met and wrote the following essay to himself (which he only shared with me six months later, when he was achieving inconceivable success):
There's a scene in Requiem for a Dream where she goes for a meeting with her psychologist with an extreme power imbalance. She needs money from him, and what he needs from her? Well, you can work it out.
I'm reminded of this scene as right now I'm sitting across the table with a multi‐multi‐millionaire (may even be a billionaire idk) and I desperately need what he has.
He wants to take someone and make them into a star and a millionaire within one year.
Mentorship, getting them clients, getting thousands of book sales so it's a number one hit when he writes the book, the lot. He is the elixir saving everything that's broken in the crummy business I've slaved over brick by boring brick.
So, we're sitting eating pizza on the beach and I mask my excitement with cynicism like I tend to do (so little is truly exciting, and the thought of being let down and it not happening? Too much.) He was on the founding team of three companies who own the internet to this day. Vice Chairman of a household name which makes a good 10 figures every year. It goes without saying that he knows anyone who's anyone in California, but his involvement in the companies that have changed the world for the last 25 years, and looking for a youngster to mentor before he retires brings a life‐changing moment.
He is interviewing people for this role and I am just one of many. He tells me about his experience talking to one of my rivals (fuck that guy, I'm thinking of my head). I have to believe every word he says.
When I was brought home from the hospital to the housing project my parents lived at, a gangster got shot in the kneecaps outside our flat. The turf war had escalated and murders were becoming every week thing. By the grace of god, we moved to a better housing project and we're okay from then on. I had come a long way and MAYBE THIS IS IT WHAT I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR.
I don't really have any control here. I tell my story but am mainly listening as the conversation happens. We're all looking to be led, for a personal savior, because life is hard at whatever stage you have it (even those who have cashed out still go crazy). “We all long to blow up and leave the past behind us” as Eminem once said.
I wanted to say “If you don't mentor me can you find me someone who will?” but I can't accept second place, I have to keep that to myself. Maybe if he says no I can tell him he's making a big mistake (and then say it).
This is only month one in Los Angeles and the number of opportunities should be heartening, but I get so focused that this HAS TO BE THE THING, rather than the abundance of opportunities in this town. I wrote this up and walked out of the restaurant with the only feeling being “fuck that! I'm gonna make it without anyone.”
It's the only consolation I can give myself to make myself feel better. My desperation since being on welfare has never left me. Maybe at some point I'll get what I want and it will cease, but for better and worse, remembering the poverty I came from strengthens my resolve that I never wanna go back to where I came from. I came out swinging to a city that was at best indifferent to my existence, and I'll find a way yet to land a knockout blow.
The message that a successful businessman would have only chosen Vin if he knew he could do it gave credence to Vin's self‐confidence. Now that Vin believed that he could, he would. Or as Napoleon Hill was fond of saying, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”
Before turning Vin loose on the world, we discussed the importance of setting daily, weekly, and monthly goals. Setting goals and planning out your day is the easiest way to stay focused. This journaling would have the added benefit of reinforcing his growth mindset. Too many people get trapped in the bottomless pit of answering emails, voicemails, and texts as soon as they come in to work each morning. We agreed that Vin would email me his weekly goals and we would measure the results in our Friday mentoring sessions. To maximize revenue, one needs to also focus on those tasks that can only be performed at specific times of the day. You can't make a sales phone call at 11 p.m. His mantra was going to have to be: daytime is for selling, nights are for writing proposals.
In complete transparency, I must admit something to the readers of this book that I never shared with Vin: he was the only candidate I interviewed. Without a control group to compare results, I thought the more effort I put into cherry‐picking the perfect candidate, the less valid and less broadly applicable the results of this Future Proofing You experiment would be. Vin was the first person I interviewed, and he ticked all the boxes.
Having selected Vin, the burden was now on me to deliver. My challenge would be to not only mentor Vin in business but to keep him motivated and focused for 365 days. Vin would often tell me that this is the hardest he'd ever worked, and that as a young man it