This Video Will Find You When You Need It the Most
Three founders who failed for years before the win, and one question to ask when you want to quit: what if it all works out?
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Big outcomes come from outlasting failure, so the habit to build is asking 'what if it all works out?' instead of accepting advice to be realistic and quit early.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You are stuck on a big project, business or creative goal and keep stalling out before you really start or follow through.
You just had a costly failure, like a bad hire, a flopped launch or a rejection, and you are deciding whether to keep going.
You want concrete historical examples of founders who failed for years, to reframe your own setbacks.
SKIP IF…
You want tactical business steps or a framework to execute. This is a motivational story compilation with no how-to system.
You prefer data over anecdotes. The stories are survivor examples and the video does not address odds or when quitting is the right call.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Cody Sanchez argues that people fail to achieve big goals because they quit early or listen to advice to be realistic. She tells three stories: James Dyson's 5,127 prototypes, Ole Kirk Christensen's fires and decades of struggle before Lego, and Jack Ma's string of rejections before Alibaba. Alongside quotes from Marcus Aurelius, Michael Jordan, Jensen Huang and Sara Blakely, the through-line is that failure is normal volume for anyone doing something big. The practical conclusion is to keep asking what happens if it all works out, treat rejections as reps, and define failure as not trying.
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Telling someone to be realistic usually means be pessimistic, so your baseline for realistic has to be optimistic if you want to do anything big.
James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes over five years, and because he never raised outside money he kept almost 100% of the company.
Dyson hires graduates over veteran engineers because they have no fear of failure, and someone who always gives the right answer learns nothing.
Ole Kirk Christensen lost his shop to fire, his business to the Depression and his factory to a second fire, and rebuilt each time.
Lego took 12 years from the carpentry workshop to the first toy sold, and decades more before the final brick design was patented.
Marcus Aurelius: the impediment to action advances action, so whatever you avoid doing right now is what you have to do.
Jack Ma was rejected by Harvard ten times, failed his math entrance exam, and was turned down for 30 jobs before building Alibaba.
Jack Ma made videos of himself explaining the internet so skeptical investors would believe it existed.
Jensen Huang says people with very high expectations have low resilience, and that character is formed by people who suffered, not by smart people.
Rejections are reps, like the 9,000 shots Michael Jordan missed, and are not evidence you should stop.
Sanchez says that a single bad hire cost $80,000 and likely millions in lost sales, and a studio build-out cost about $50K, yet she treats these as tuition.
Sara Blakely's father asked her what she failed at each week and celebrated the answer, which redefined failure as not trying rather than a bad outcome.
Writing down the hidden gift in every embarrassing setback trains you to find the upside in what did not go as expected.
Takeaway
Failure is the volume of attempts big outcomes require.
WHAT TO LEARN
Every founder in the video succeeded after absurd amounts of failure, so the useful habit is to keep asking what happens if it works and to define failure as not trying.
Treat realistic as a trap word. If your baseline for realistic is pessimistic, you will quit before the odds ever get a chance to turn.
Count your failures. Dyson's 5,127 prototypes suggest that if you have not failed much, you probably have not tried hard enough for the success you want.
Owning your equity early compounds. Dyson never raised money in the beginning, so years of failing slowly became near-total ownership of a billion-dollar company.
Obstacles that burn your workshop down can force the upgrade. Christensen's fires pushed him toward toys and plastic, which became Lego.
Rejections are reps, not verdicts. Jack Ma's 30 job rejections and 30 investor rejections were the cost of the one yes that mattered.
Low expectations build resilience. Jensen Huang argues that high expectations with no setbacks produce fragile people, and pain refines character.
Redefine failure as not trying. Sara Blakely's family celebrated weekly failures, which made risk-taking normal instead of scary.
Write down the hidden gift after each setback. A short written note on what you gained turns an embarrassment into usable material.
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I want you to close your eyes and just ask yourself one question. What if it all works out? Like, what if you actually are able to achieve that big giant thing that you want to do, you follow through this time, and you don't quit before you even start?
That is what this episode today is about. And I'm not going to waste a second because you shouldn't either. This is The Big Deal Podcast.
I'm Cody Sanchez. Let's get into it.
I got amped thinking about this because I was talking to Robert Greene, and I think one of the reasons you don't achieve the things you want out of life is because other people tell you to be realistic, which is maybe one of the worst lines in the human language. Like, how many times have you heard that phrase, be realistic, applied towards the things you actually achieved in life?
I think it's mid -speak for be pessimistic, don't take risk, you're probably going to fail. I failed a lot. Like, you know, I built multiple nine -figure businesses.
And I think my baseline for realistic has to be optimistic in order for us to do anything big. I have to have this. unhinged belief, which you have to have too, that you will eventually succeed.
And as you're about to hear from the stories of these three entrepreneurs that I pulled together that I want you to think about today is that these three seemingly ordinary people are going to rewire your brain to look for possibilities before they look for all the reasons why something won't work in the world. Okay, the first story is about what we're calling the quote -unquote failure.
So I don't know if you guys know James Dyson. But Dyson is a company that makes those crazy looking vacuums and they made like air blade hand dryers, a whole bunch of crazy consumer electronics.
So you might not know that James Dyson, the founder, went through 5 ,127, I believe, failures and basically had one success over five years prototyping the bagless vacuum cleaner. And what's fascinating about that is like Even the ones that he got to work were basically too fragile for the market, too expensive, that couldn't be made.
But he would just not quit. And so he basically finally sells one two years in, but he was never able to raise a penny for this company in the beginning. And that meant that he still owns almost 100 % of the company.
And that ownership stake has made him a billionaire, the guy who made vacuums. And probably... propelled him past the point that most people would quit and so I think one of the reasons that I bring this up is like do you have enough failures for the success that you say you want in life?
And I think the answer is probably no. I think you probably haven't failed enough for the success that you say that you want. And that anybody who is doing big things out there in the world knows you're failing almost constantly to the point where you don't even think about it.
I mean, if any given week we're making a mistake in one of my businesses that is costing me tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions of dollars every single week. And if I was at all precious about that, I wouldn't be as successful as I was today. So what's your version of that?
And I think Dyson is interesting because this is woven into his entire company. I actually want you to listen to this clip about why he hires graduates instead of veteran engineers. I try to always employ graduates because they have no fear.
They have no experience. I don't want experience. I want people who haven't done something before and want to find a new and better way of doing it.
and who have no fear of failure. Because failure is so important. It's what you learn from it.
If you always succeed and always give the right answer, you're learning nothing. So I want people who feel as though they're pioneering and want to do something in a different and better way. If you keep asking yourself what happens if it all works out...
you're just going to keep moving forward progress on the things you want to do in your life. Because you're going to be like, what if this next thing works? What if this next thing works?
And you're going to keep pushing past the point that is reasonable. You know, Mike Tyson has a great quote. He basically said, man is not meant to be humble.
He is meant to be humbled. That's from one of the greatest of all times, right? Getting actually punched in the face.
And so the question you need to keep asking yourself is like, what if it all works out? So if we think about you know, James Dyson as the failure, the next one, and maybe you feel like a failure.
I feel, I felt like a failure many times in life. In fact, even right now in this moment, I have this big hairy problem in one of my businesses that I literally cannot figure out how to solve. It's like kept me up a lot of sleepless nights.
I'm trying to work through the problem, trying to stay confident, but like I could fail at this portion. And the only thing that's keeping me going is like, what if it works out and how do I figure this out? and that we probably will one day.
So the next person I want to talk to you about is the unlucky one. It's actually the creator of Lego, you know, the little building blocks. So his name was Ole Kirk Christensen.
He's Danish. And he was a carpenter. And his journey to create Lego took decades.
Like in 1916, he was 24 years old. He bought an existing carpentry shop in his town. And what's fascinating is he was just doing like normal stuff, doors, you know, tables, whatever.
Then in 1924, so what is that? That's almost 10 years later, his business burns to the ground and so does his house. What did he do?
He rebuilt it. He took on a bunch of debt. By 1932, the Great Depression then crushed his business again.
And that same year, his wife died. Then what does he do? He starts making wooden toys to keep the business alive.
Then in 1942, disaster struck again. His factory burned to the ground, destroyed most of his life's work. So what did he do?
He rebuilt again. And this time, his toy business took off. And so he made a huge bet.
He invested in a really expensive plastic injection molding machine when plastic toys were still like a crazy idea. That wasn't anything done. Wood was normal.
By 1949, so this happened in 1942, by 1949, Lego was selling its first plastic building bricks, but nobody really wanted them. And so Lego made all these bricks. They kept improving the product.
But they were like really failing at getting anybody to pick it up. Retails were just not interested in it. Takes all the way forward, almost another 10 years, 1958.
Ole's son developed a design that gave Legos those locking together, you know, qualities. We know about them today. They filed a patent.
Six weeks later, Ole died at 66 years old. So I want to take this back for a second. Took 12 years from the day Ole bought his workshop to the day he sold his first toy.
17 years after that to create the first plastic Lego brick. Nine years after that to create the final design that was patented. And then another decade plus before Lego became a household name.
Like, he spent decades failing and not giving up to create an empire that now his entire family has benefited from. By the time he died, Lego had grown from a struggling carpentry shop into a company with 140 employees and international success. Today, they have 25 ,000 employees and did $13 billion in revenue last year.
They also are supposedly one of the happiest companies. in his country. Marcus Aurelius has an amazing quote, actually.
He says, the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. And I love this, because if you think about it, that's true.
Whatever it is that you don't want to do right now becomes the thing that you have to do. And there's no way that Ole would have had this really successful, multinational, multibillion -dollar company if he could have just stayed small. and done wooden carpentry and not had something burned down and not have to keep iterating.
And so does life happen for you or to you? You know, it reminds me today I was writing about all the things that I have failed at in business of late. Like we hired a recruiter.
It was $80 ,000 to hire somebody. And that hire ended up failing. Cut our like close rate in half for one of the businesses.
That person probably cost us millions of dollars in potential sales. Like we had another video we spent 10K on. It just sort of flopped.
I was even thinking about the podcast. We built this like sick podcast studio at the other location. Now we have a new headquarters that doesn't fit in this location.
Probably cost me like 50K to build out the podcast studio. It's like all these little fails again and again. First of all, to Cody, when she first graduated and only made $37 ,000 a year, a $50 ,000 podcast build out.
It sounds nutty, you know, losing $80 ,000 just finding a person, not even the hundreds of thousands of dollars I paid this guy. Probably sounds funny, but I kind of go back to that Michael Jordan quote, which is, I've missed more than 9 ,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games.
26 times I've been trusted to take the game -winning shot and missed. I failed over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed. I go back to, like, some of the greats from today, too.
You know, Jensen Wong, the CEO of NVIDIA, speaking at Stanford. talking to a bunch of Stanford diplomas and watch what he says about pain and suffering. I have very low expectations.
And I mean that. Most of the Stanford graduates have very high expectations. And you deserve to have high expectations because you came from a great school.
You were very successful. You're top of your class. Obviously, you were able to pay for tuition.
And then you're graduating from one of the finest institutions on the planet. You're surrounded by other kids that are just incredible. You naturally have very high expectations.
People with very high expectations have very low resilience.
And unfortunately, resilience matters in success.
I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you. And I was fortunate that I grew up with my parents providing a condition for us to be successful on the one hand, but there were plenty of opportunities for setbacks and suffering.
And to this day, I use the phrase pain and suffering inside our company with great glee. And I mean that. Boy, this is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering.
And I mean that in a happy way. Because you want to refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them.
And greatness is not intelligence, as you know. Greatness comes from character. And character isn't formed out of smart people.
It's formed out of people who suffered. And so if I could wish upon you, I don't know how to do it, but for all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering. I think the dots always connect if you allow it enough time and consistency in order for you to see the pattern on the page.
Now, the last story I want to talk to you about is the reject. So his name is Jack Ma. Jack Ma founded this company called Alibaba.
You guys have heard of that, right? So when it IPO'd in 2024, it raised about $25 billion. It was the biggest IPO in history at that time.
But let me tell you how he got there. If you don't know that, if you only saw him on stage, you might not think all these other things. But he actually, this is almost impressive, he failed his elementary school exams twice.
He failed his middle school exam three times. He scored one out of 120 in math on Chinese college entrance exams. And then he failed it again because once wasn't enough.
Then he scrapes by in what he calls the worst school in his city, but only because the English department was short on applicants and they bumped up rejects. He was rejected by Harvard how many times? Ten.
And then he went looking for a job and was rejected on his first 30 applications. In fact, this is wild. KFC opened in his hometown.
24 people applied. 23 people got hired. Guess who did it?
Jack Ma, the guy rejected. He applies to even become a police officer. Three other guys, there's four dudes that apply.
Three other guys get in. He doesn't. So, like, at what point would you have just given up, I don't know, played a small life?
What if he had just ended up at KFC, right, instead of a multi -multi -billionaire? And so then he ends up in 1995. He saw the Internet for the first time in Seattle and was like, wait a second.
There's going to be this thing called e -commerce. I believe in this. It's happening in the U .S.
It's happening in Seattle. So he came home and he said, let's bring this to China, started one of the Internet's China's first Internet companies. And then the rejection starts all over again.
Every investor, every person he pitched was like, this is a scam. This is ludicrous. What are you talking about?
So he started videotaping himself explaining the internet so he'd have proof he hadn't invented the entire thing. And then somehow he managed to build that into a company that was worth billions and billions. You know, he pitched 30, I believe, venture capitalists and got turned down by every single one until actually Goldman Sachs wrote a $5 million check.
And that now turned into the legendary investor Masayoshi Son. handed him 20 million bucks. And that meeting with Masa lasted only six minutes because by the time Jack was there, he was like unstoppable, right?
He's like, tell me I'm going to fail again. Tell me I'm going to fail again. I'm going to keep going.
And three years later, Jack Ma's new company, Alibaba, made his first dollar of profit. And so I look at these dots that you could connect. It's like, what if it all just works out?
Maybe exactly how it's supposed to. Maybe the thing in front of you failing is not that big of a deal, actually. And those disadvantages are actually the advantages you're waiting for in your life.
And so, you know, if James Dyson had to fail 5 ,000 times and Ole had to have his factory burned down twice and Jack Ma had to get rejected from like every job available in all of China, then like, why do you think you and I are going to be any different, right? Rejections are probably just reps. They're just the 9 ,000 shots that Michael Jordan has taken, you know, the 300 games that he's lost.
It's hard to internalize this when you're going through it. You know, I'm there right now. You can just stay up and think about all the things that are difficult in your life right now.
Sometimes when you pull back and you think, hey, those aren't failures. Those are just dots that weren't supposed to be connected. Then things get a little bit easier.
And I want to leave you with like a short video of an incredible entrepreneur who's also a billionaire. been privileged to get to know her husband, Jesse Eitzler, and this is Sarah Blankley, the founder of Spakes. I want to listen.
You'll listen to how she defines failure. Growing up, my father used to ask my brother and me what we had failed at at the dinner table, which was so interesting, and he'd celebrate it, and he'd actually be disappointed if I didn't have something that I failed at that week. So I can remember saying, Dad, Dad, I tried out for this, and I was horrible, and he would actually high -five me and say, Congratulations, way to go.
And what it did was just reframe my definition of failure. Failure for me became not trying versus the outcome. So many people don't take risks for fear of failure.
They don't start the business, they don't go create the art they want to create, or they don't go try out to be in the play, or whatever it is for the fear of failure. And once you redefine that for yourself and realize the failure is just not trying, then life opens up to you in many ways. And I would also, my dad would encourage me anytime something didn't go the way I expected it to.
Maybe I got embarrassed by a situation to write down where the hidden gifts were and what I got out of it. And I started realizing in everything there was some amazing nugget that I wouldn't have wanted to pass up. So here's what I want to leave you with.
I actually don't want to give you more comfort. I don't want to give you winning. I don't want to give you positive affirmations.
I want to give you a little pain and suffering and failure because I think that might be exactly what you need to get to the spot you truly want to go to. My name's Cody Sanchez. This is The Big Deal Podcast, and I'll see you next week.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Most big goals die from quitting early, not from being impossible. Cody Sanchez opens by asking you to picture the opposite: what if it all works out? Then she backs it with three founders who failed for years first.
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Neuroscientist Emily McDonald walks Codie Sanchez through how the brain constructs reality, and the concrete techniques to rewire the filter that decides what you get to experience.
Codie Sanchez and Eric Jorgenson spend 62 minutes rebuilding Naval Ravikant's worldview from the inside out — leverage, productizing yourself, the four kinds of luck, and the quiet art of desire management.
CEO coach Joe Hudson tells Codie Sanchez why work ethic barely correlates with wealth, and what actually decides who gets rich: emotional fluidity, honest conversations, and a handful of good decisions a day.
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