I Stole Everyone Else's Idea to Build My Business (And You Should Too)

Most entrepreneurs are trying to invent something original while their competitors are quietly stealing proven ideas and printing money. In this episode, Bernie Gallerani breaks down why originality is one of the biggest lies in business, and how studying, modeling, and executing other people's ideas is the real strategy behind some of the biggest names in the world, from Steve Jobs to Sam Walton to Ray Kroc. If you've been waiting for your big original idea, this episode will change how you think about building a business.

Transcript

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Hi, everybody. Bernie Gallarani bringing you another episode of Success is Not Convenient. I have a fun topic today that I hope really penetrates all of my entrepreneur friends' minds. Just in some conversation I've had and some struggles that I've talked to with other entrepreneurs about ideas and growing their business and all those kinds of things. So here's the title. The title of today's uh episode is I stole everyone else's idea to build my business. All the ideas and all the things that I've learned over the years really came from somebody else, all the friends that are in the business that have succeeded at an extremely high level, that I've networked with and I've met with, and all the podcasts and all the books and things that I've read. And so for the last 22 years of running this particular company, um, I would say that nothing really in any of it actually came from me. It all actually came from other people. I just kind of listened to what other people were doing, um, and then I implemented in my business. And if I felt like it worked well in my business, I kept it. If not, then I would seek out other things. So let me tell you something that might might really offend some people here, but almost every successful business owner that you admire stole their ideas from somebody else. It's not like we created ourselves, it's not like we have to be so smart and so original that in order to be successful, we have to do something unique and different from everybody else. And that's not what most businesses are, right? Um, it's not copied illegally and it's not faked out. It's not, you know, I didn't cheat it from anybody. It says I just studied people who were already winning. And most businesses are like that. They're just studying people who are already winning, and then they implement what has already been proven to work. How fun is that? Just trying things that other people are already having success in gives you a higher probability of it being successful. Most entrepreneurs are sitting around, they're trying to invent something, trying to invent something even like revolutionary, like, oh, this has to be different while they're going broke. And and meanwhile, smart business owners and owners that are really listening and paying attention and learning and observing and modeling and adjusting and executing, they're the ones that are growing because they're not trial and airing it. They already know it works by just following other people. You do not need to be a genius to become successful in any business. You don't. You don't need to have original ideas. You just need some humility. You need to have awareness and you need to have the ability to shut your mouth long enough to learn from people who already did what it is that you want to do. So you don't have to write the code. The code's already written. You just have to pay attention. See, these are the lies entrepreneurs tell themselves as I need my own original idea. No, you don't. There's a lot of really great ideas that aren't executed to the fullest. Take somebody's ideas and just execute them at a higher level. This is one of the biggest lies that business people tell them is that I have to have something original. Most businesses that explode are not original ideas, they are improved execution of an existing idea. And that is like they're taking something, thinking it's a good idea and maneuvering it that works within their business, right? Like you could open a coffee shop and you're going to be another coffee shop, but what makes it successful? It's how you approach it, how you market it, how you expose it, what's something different about your particular coffee shop, right? Real estate company. You might be opening a gym that has to have some sort of a different angle to get people to pay attention, right? You could be in the roofing business, right? You could even do a podcast, right, like this, and say, well, how do I develop a successful podcast? I'm not learning anything from podcasting that I'm not stealing from other people. I go in and watch podcasts and watch podcasts and watch podcasts and look and say, where does my idea and my podcast fit along the lines of what other people are doing? What successful things can we pull from what other people are doing, right? So don't feel like you have to create everything on your own. Just follow what other people are doing. The market is full of market is overloaded with nothing but duplication, nothing but stealing ideas from other people. And who executes better? Who communicates better? Who stays consistent longer is the one who wins this game? Whoever studies the best people wins. I'm gonna say this again. Are you studying people, processes, procedures? Are you invested in your business enough that you're traveling around and looking at what other successful people are doing? Because successful people who borrowed ideas are the ones that actually succeed at the highest level. Steve Jobs with Apple, he didn't invent the MP3 player, the smartphone, and the tablet. He actually took ideas. He took people that were doing things like that and just perfected it. They perfected and simplified ideas that already existed. Steve Jobs openly admitted that he studied great designs and borrowed ideas constantly from people. It wasn't his. He took them from other things. And that's what I want you to understand. One of his famous quotes is good artists copy, great artists steal. Good artists copy and great artists steal. Not literally still the product, but still the concept, still the system, still the inspiration. They still the standard in what other people have. Sam Walton, who owns Walmart, Sam Walton built Walmart by traveling all over the country studying other retailers. What he would do is he would go to different places and he would literally walk the competitor stores with notebooks and write things down. He even admitted, like observing all the pricing, how the stores were laid out, how did it operate, like why was the operation so successful? He he studied all of the inventory systems. He looked at the customer flow back and forth. He didn't even pretend he invented the retail. He became obsessed with just learning, learning from other people. This is something we've talked about before: books and podcasts and meeting people and traveling. This is where the education comes from. Ray Kroc, who owns McDonald's, Ray Kroc didn't invent McDonald's. People are like, oh, Ray Kroc started McDonald's. No, he didn't. He stole it. Yes, technically he bought it, but you guys saw the movie. And uh McDonald's brothers already had the system. They had the system, they taught it to him. But Ray Kroc saw something brilliant and scaled it better than anyone else in the world. And that's called business. And finding something proven to improve the execution and the scale aggressively is the strategy. I want you to understand this. You don't have to have an original idea. You just have to work somebody else's idea to a point where it makes you profitable. I love what Tony Robbins openly talks about, like modeling successful people. He studied lots of people. He studied philosophy, psychology, communication. He looked at what peak performers were doing, high performers. He really was into human behavior, how the brain works. His entire career was built on learning patterns from successful people and then teaching those patterns to others like myself. I listened to a lot of Tony Robbins and have been for many, many years. Matter of fact, the very first book I ever read, and I'm not kidding you, from cover to cover after I got out of high school, was Awaken the Giant Within. That was his very first book that he put out. And I was 24 years old, and I read this book and it changed how I totally looked at my life. See, Tony doesn't say I want to invent human psychology. He said I want to understand what works. Like, how can I teach this to others? That's a massive difference. He's not creating human psychology, he's learning about human psychology from other people. Let's look at Elon Musk. I always talk about Elon Musk in these in these podcasts. People think Elon Musk invented everything, right? My God, the guy's building everything, right? He didn't invent electric cars. He didn't invent rockets. Rockets were well before Elon Musk was ever born. He didn't even create online payments. He entered industries with an existing idea, improved them through obsession, speed, engineering, and execution. He just took something else and he improved upon that. Execution beats original ideas almost every single time. And here's why most people never learn from the winners, right? Is their ego is so strong they can never lower themselves to be open to other successful people. People don't want to admit someone else knows more than they do. So what happens is they stay stuck and they try to reinvent everything. Successful people ask this question who already solved it? What are they doing? How do I implement that from here moving forward? That's what entrepreneurs do. You we we think like, well, entrepreneurs have all these real man, they're they're smart people. I can promise you this. I've met more entrepreneurs that barely graduated high school or didn't graduate high school that have become successful because they had a desire to learn from other people. Listening is work. Learning from other people is work. Reading a lot of books consistently is a lot of work. Can you imagine reading 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 books every year, reading four or five books every month? It's it's not easy. But you know that you learn so many things from reading books. Most people consume entertainment. They don't really look at education. How many people you see it? I know you all do, where you're at dinner and you see all these young people, and all they're doing is they're scrolling on their social media feeds. What a waste of time. Think about this. The average American spends hours a day, hours scrolling social media, watching Netflix or some sort of streaming channel, consuming junk content constantly, putting that in their brain versus positive, educated, growth-minded thinking. But they won't even spend 30 minutes reading a book or one hour do it going to a conference, right? They won't have any sort of time listening to a business podcast. They won't do anything, but then they sit there and wonder why their life never changes. How are you ever going to change if you don't learn anything different? They lack a massive amount of humility. And some people think, well, that wouldn't work for me. So they're already self-doubting. And that's okay. I keep thinking that because it won't if you keep thinking that. But they've never actually tried consistently to ever do anything. Winners completely stay coachable. Coachable, coachable, coachable. And the minute you think you know everything, your growth starts dying. I have these people right now that are in my company. They actually believe they've made it. But yet their income might be fairly high, but nowhere near those that are growth-minded and open-minded to continue to keep learning. You start thinking you know everything, and what happens is your growth starts dying. So let me go back to a little bit of like the the mindset behind what's changing even our business that we're in, right? Anything that like catapults us. I built my business by studying people who were already operating at a level I wanted to reach. And so how I found them was I signed up for coaching. All right. And I paid a thousand dollars a month for someone to tell me how to run my business. But what was fun and where actually I learned most of all the things that I learned was going to all the retreats and meeting all the people. And I've said this to people all the time. Sure, I love my mentor and he and I've been with him for 22 years and he runs a great program, but I learned so much from all the people I met that were at his events. I listened to podcasts, and um, before podcasting was even really huge, I would listen to motivational speakers like Jim Rome and Tony Robbins and really paid a lot of attention to all these different people. And of course, podcasts came around and even made it easier. If you're listening to this podcast right now, you have no excuse for not educating yourself at a high level. Education is free and it's everywhere, right? Are you attending masterminds? I was in masters, still am in mastermind groups, mastermind groups, meeting with people, smart people. How do you do this? How do you do that? Right? Hiring coaches, right? Getting the right kind of coaches. Watched how these top performers actually talked and acted. And all I did was copy what they did and built that into my structure. I copied their follow-up systems, I copied their accountability measures, I copied all of their lead generation tools. And over time I built my own version through implementation. I created my own brand through their ideas. I stole their ideas. I would see them and I would then I would listen and I would take notes and I would hijack those concepts in my brain and I'd get back on my airplane and I would get on the airplane and I would write everything that I learned. And then I'd come back and I'd implement some things in my business, and some things worked well and some things didn't. But I didn't create them. I never created anything in my business. It was all picked up by other people. And I think the challenge that some of us have is we don't ever invest in ourselves to learn anything positive from other people, so we struggle constantly. See, the people winning at the highest level are usually the biggest learners in the room. I'm gonna say this again. The ones that succeed at the highest level are the ones that are really seeking education from others. They're not the smartest people, and they're not the most talented. I can promise you that. I have a high school diploma people. I mean, come on, you don't have to, you know, as I always say to I I rode this the short bus to school, right? I barely graduated high school. I hated school. I mean, I I could tell you the the times I sat in my counselor's office when I was in high school, and they're like, you're not gonna graduate. And it's like, all right, now you challenge me, I'm gonna figure it out. Be the most obsessed with learning. Just be obsessed with learning. Don't stop being eager to learn. And what entrepreneurs should do really is just read a lot more books. Books compress decades into days. You guys realize like somebody lives a life, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, whatever it might be, they're living a life and they're writing it down and they're saying, listen, this is what I learned in my life. And you literally, it's 200 pages and you read it in a week. You just got a just think about this. Every time you read a book, let's just say you read 50 books, let's say you read 20 books, let's say you read 10, I don't care. Every time you read a book, you just take somebody's life lesson and you just put it in your brain in a week, in a month, and you just learn 20 years, 30 years, 40 years of somebody's life into 250, 300 pages. So books compress decades into days. One idea can change just your income forever. Just one idea can change your income forever. Listen to podcasts. Your car can become your university. Guys, we have Bluetooth and all these easy ways to download these podcasts. Why are we listening to crap? Why are we listening to music? Well, that makes me feel good. Yeah, but you're broke. Well, you don't understand, man. I get more inspired by listening to music. Well, great. Does your bank account align up with your inspiration? Instead of listening to garbage, listen to people solving problems at a high level. We're just too busy in immediate gratification of I don't want to be involved in that because I need a break. It's like, okay, well, your bank account doesn't need a break because your mortgage is due, your car payment is due. You maybe you need a new car, right? Start getting around people, attend conferences and retreats, and uh, you need just need more exposure. Your environment needs to be changed. Your thinking in your environment needs to be changed. You got to start realizing that bigger goals are possible, bigger things, bigger opportunities are out there, bigger businesses are possible. Your excuses are smaller than your thought. Your excuses are smaller than your thought. Your vision is there, your excuses, though, are down here. And what's it's fun and it's interesting is your excuses actually went out to your vision, and your vision's big, but just some little thought enters your brain, and you're like, I don't think I'm gonna do that. I'm just gonna go back a couple of years. I got invited to fly up to Michigan, I'll say that, to meet some people. And it was in January. And if you've ever been to Michigan, I'd never been to Michigan for in my life, by the way, but I got invited in January to go to Michigan through some of these uh marketing people that I work with. Um they wanted me to go up and meet some personality um radio hosts that do a syndicated show around the United States. And so I flew up there, it was like a day trip. I flew up there and I had breakfast um with the gentleman who um invited me up to meet these folks, and he brought somebody with him to go to breakfast. And so there were the three of us at breakfast, and I met this person, we started talking, and he said something. We we had about 45-minute um breakfast, but he said something to me that was like, oh my goodness, holy smokes! He said one thing, one thing. I'm thinking I'm going up to meet these radio hosts to do my friend a favor, and I'm having breakfast with somebody I didn't expect to have breakfast with, and the person said something that I went, oh my goodness, a light bulb, boom. Guys, I came back and I implemented that one thing that that person added to my life, and I increased my revenue in my company by over a million dollars on a 45-minute breakfast. One million plus. And by the way, it'll even be more this year. Exactly, it was more last year because it was a couple years ago I did that, and it's gonna be even more this year. So I'm, and by the way, this person who shared it with me, I'm friends with now, and I thank him all the time for sharing that information. But thank goodness I went. I didn't even want to go. Oh, it's cold, it's this, it's that, but thank God I did it, right? So get around successful people because success leaves clues. Successful people, guys, they want to share with you. Very successful. I've learned that the more successful I meet people, the more they want to share with you. And what you watch is you watch how they think and how they solve problems and how they communicate. You'll realize like how disciplined they are. And you're going, wow, well, if they can do it, I can do it, right? And so, what's the message I'm trying to leave with you guys today? Is stop trying to be the smartest person in the room and be open-minded. Because if you're the smartest person in the room, you're exhausted. You're too busy patting yourself on the back and telling everybody what you know. I know these people, by the way, and it's exhausting for me to hear it. I can only imagine how exhausted they are. Instead, become the best student in the room. One of the things you just need to ask yourself is listen, I don't really the older I get, the more I realize I don't know. Right? I recently had a birthday, and I'm like, you know, after all this time, I'm much uh I realize how less I know as a person at my age today than I knew when I was 30 or when I was 40 or when I turned 50. I knew, like, oh my gosh, like I used to think I knew a lot. Let me tell you, I don't really know all that much. Most successful entrepreneurs are not inventors, they are observers. I'm gonna say this. Most entrepreneurs are not inventors. They just listen and watch other people. They just pay attention and they learn and they implement and they keep repeating that. The truth is, somebody already has the answer you're looking for. The question for you is are you humble enough to listen and learn from it? Because your next breakthrough may not come from your ideas, it may come from one sentence in a podcast, one word or one breakfast that puts seven over seven figures into my business from one person. It could be one chapter in a book, could be just one conversation at a conference, could be one mentor. You know, I think about like when I signed up for coaching, I had to pay a thousand dollars a month, twelve thousand dollars a year, and I remember a wife saying, Well, you're a really good salesperson. I don't think you need that person. Something was telling me that I'm really not that great of a salesperson. And I really don't know. I was feeling vulnerable and maybe insecure, and I felt like I needed the help. I I always find it interesting, and I've had lots of friends, hundreds and hundreds of them, that I meet and hang out with at some of these events that I go to. And you know, you see these folks coming in and out of coaching and they quit and they think they know it all, and they jump around to this coaching company, they come around that one, and then three years later you see them come back or they call you and say, Hey, I'm leaving. It's like, why? Why are you hopping around? Just stay focused. I've had the same coach and the same mentor for 22 years. I've never left because everything I need to understand is right here. It's not that my mentor or my coaching program doesn't know it. It's just I'm not prepared yet to listen to it. I my ego is too big, I'm too smart, I don't listen. And if I listened and I was humble, I would learn a lot more. One uncomfortable moment where you finally admit to yourself that you don't have all the answers. I think that we all need to get to that point in our life where if we think we know everything, we're dead in the water. Maybe somebody else knows something that I don't know that I need to learn. And that mindset right there can completely change the business, your income, and your life forever. Forever. What if the only thing standing between you and success is your unwillingness to learn from others? Or maybe I should say it a different way. Your unwillingness to listen from others and pay attention is what's standing in your way of your success. How many great ideas have you ignored because your ego told you, I'm just gonna do it my way? I'm just gonna do it the way I want to do it. How's your bank account? Could it have more in it? How's your life? Is it fully fulfilled? I can give you a ton of stories of the way I used to think that I changed the way I looked at the situation. One of my favorite lines, and I've said this on other podcasts before, is when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. And I think that's what we're talking about today. Do you have to be right? Are you willing to be open and changing the way you look at the situation? Are you spending more time consuming entertainment or consuming an education? That's a fun one, right? Because when you look at this, we go home, we watch TV, we get on social media, we watch podcasts, we go have fun with our friends. Where's the education piece? Where's the book? Where's the podcast? Where's the retreat? Where's the coach? Where's the high-level business friend that you need to have lunch, breakfast with? I don't know where I know where mine are because I'm with them. Are you with them? Are you intentionally studying right now of what it takes for you to get to the next level? See, if success leaves clues, are you actually paying attention? Because success does leave clues. And when you wrap yourself around really solid, business-minded, growth-minded people, they will give you everything you need to know. I have a really good friend of mine, and he does extremely well in life. I mean, lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of, you know, most everybody around is um on food stamps compared to this guy, right? I mean, and and I get a chance to to to meet and hang out with this guy quite often, actually. We're very close. And just the things just in regular general conversation, the things that come out of his mouth unintentionally, just through who he is, I literally just go, Oh my god, that is gold. Goodness. And my life's improved by being friends with this person, just being friends. We're not business associates, we're just friends. We go eat lunch, we go have dinner, we hang out on the weekends occasionally. We're just friends. But if you just pay attention, those friends can add value to your life on all sorts of areas. But if we're busy knowing it all, we're never gonna grow. Guys, I just want to say this. Thank you so much for paying attention, for listening, continuing to keep listening. Thank you. It means a ton to me. If you don't mind, hit that like button, that subscribe button, and write me a note too. I mean, I have gotten more responses recently from so many great people like you, and it gives me really great ideas for my podcasts and stuff. I I just think I just said one on the last couple that I did that the last two or three podcasts that I've done have come from great people like you who give me ideas, and that I get to go in and research it and learn. And what's really cool is I'm learning more by doing this podcast because I have to research it all and find out how it impacts me and how I want to deliver that message to you. So I just want to say thank you all for spending time. Um, this is 30 minutes, that you could have done something else, and you made a decision to educate yourself today. And I'm honored that you chose me to help you do that. And if there's anything I can do, please, please, please reach out. I'd love to help. Hope everybody has a great day.