The Right Hustle With Rajesh Setty

Posted by John Livesay in podcast 0 comments

Many people say you won’t get far without hustle. In truth, it’s not just hustle that will take you far; it has to be the right hustle. John Livesay is joined by author and entrepreneur, Rajesh Setty as they discuss what the right hustle means and how you can achieve it. Rajesh talks about his early forays into writing and the rejections, and ultimately, the first book he sold. He also discusses connecting with people, generosity, and the art of learning.

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Listen to the podcast here

The Right Hustle With Rajesh Setty

Our guest is Rajesh Setty who talks about his course, The Right Hustle. The big question is, do I care about what you care about? It is the genesis of every relationship he has. Finally, he says, “What is your GQ?” Find out what GQ stands for. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Rajesh Setty who is Silicon Valley’s secret spark plug from startups to scaleups. He loves to bring meaningful ideas to life via startups like Audvisor.com and MentorCloud.com. His books include Six Foot World and Smart, but Stuck. He also has a course called The Right Hustle. Welcome to the show.

I’m super excited. Thank you for having me.

You’re one of those people that pulls people in. Your magnetism, kindness and creativity are all so inspiring, and people want to be around your energy. I’m curious to know a little bit about your own story of origin. You can take us back to childhood or when you were in school. How did you discover this passion for bringing ideas to life, not just generically but doing it with love?

It was not by design, for sure. By the time I was four, I had started reading all sorts of books. Anything that went past me, I would read it in multiple languages. In India, many people grew up with many languages. I love reading. By the time I was about nine, I had read about 700 books. Most of them were useless books, according to my mom, because they were thrillers, fantasy, adventure, spy thrillers and murder mysteries. You name it, I would read it.

The Right Hustle: Everybody talks about hustle and get things done. Whenever the word is used, the connotation is you have to network to get something. That’s the wrong hustle.

When I read that many books, most of them were fiction, I used to think, “I know what happens in this book.” I know this is what will happen, but most of the time, something else would happen, and I would get frustrated with myself, not with the author, saying, “How can I not guess what it is?” After some time, I thought, “My forecasting powers were good. Authors were making a mistake, and they should have done it this way.” I then got frustrated with them. I said, “The only solution is I should write my book because I can make the characters do whatever I want and the story to develop however I want it to develop.”

I went on a journey for over eight months. I never wrote a poem. I never wrote a short story. I wrote a novel, which was more than 200 pages. My parents thought something was wrong with me. My parents thought I copied it from somewhere else. For me, I thought, “How many people would write a book when somebody is nine years old? I’ll send it to a publisher. I’ll get a red carpet welcome and my books will be in the bookstores, and I will be a celebrity.” That was what I was thinking. Nothing remotely close happened.

The moment I picked up the phone and called the publisher in my baby voice, the first thing is they click the phone back thinking somebody is doing a prank or somebody is playing games. I would call them back again. At that time, there was no internet and in our home, there was no phone. I had to go to a grocery store nearby where there’s a public payphone booth that I had to put money in, and then I had to dial. I keep dialing again and I said, “Please don’t hang up. I’m an author.” Until I say, “Never call me again or I’ll call the police,” or something, I’d keep trying. Long story short, I was rejected 160 times over 3.5 years.

That’s a lot of rejection. Why did you not take it personally?

[bctt tweet=”What is your GQ – Generosity Quotient?” username=”John_Livesay”]

Earlier, I would think they’re making a mistake. They’re wrong. I would think that I’m not getting the right person. I was experimenting with myself. After some time, I realized something is not right. I reframed it thinking, “Everybody gets rejected maybe 200 to 300 times. I’m still not there. Let me finish my rejection quota so that I will get to the right one quickly.” I used to keep on reframing to my convenience. That’s what I used to do.

Whatever story we tell ourselves that keeps us going is the key. Whether it’s overcoming a physical challenge in sports or an illness, our dream is going to happen sooner than later.

I still remember the time when I got a book deal. I was physically meeting a publisher and I gave them the manuscript. By that time, I had built a network of my own because when I get rejected, I reach out to other people, “How do you do it?” You build relationships and I got a referral to this publisher. I went and they said, “This is interesting. Let me take a look.” He turned on the side and then he started reading it. I was a thirteen-year-old kid so I don’t know whether to stay or to leave because he didn’t ask me to leave. I was standing there for about two hours. He forgot that I was there. He finished reading the book, he turned around and said, “You’re still here.” I said, “Yes, I’m here because you didn’t tell me to leave.” He said, “I’m sorry. I’m going to take this. It’s a good book. How much do you want?” That is one question I was not prepared for. I had no idea what to say. With great thought and a lot of stupidity, I said, “I need ₹100.” ₹100 is $1.50, so you can imagine what I asked for. He said, “Are you sure?” I said, “Yes. That is what I want for this book.” He picked up the money, gave it to me and said, “We have a deal.” That was a game-changing moment for me.

That’s a great story and an example of hustle. That leads to my next question, which is you have a course called The Right Hustle, which is this fine art of moving the needle and that it is an art form. It’s not just push, push, push. I love that you talk about choreographing actions, which to me implies that there’s some preparation and thought that goes in before you jump in.

The Right Hustle: We have more tools than ever before on this planet that will make you get closer in the spirit and in the mind.

My thinking is that everybody talks about hustle and get things done. Whenever the word is used, the connotation is you have to network to get something. I think that’s the wrong hustle. The right hustle is to network to give something. You don’t have to get all the time because there’s a universal accounting system that will take care of the checks and balances and all the accounting system. Your goal is to give something meaningful. When you reach out to someone, and you connect with someone, make sure that you give a gift rather than trying to get something from them. How do you do it? That’s the whole thing about the right hustle. What will give you the platform, power, strength, skills and abilities so that you are always giving?

One of your many books is called Six Foot World. How did you come up with the title?

This is probably the first book that got published about the pandemic. As soon as the pandemic was onset, within three months, I wrote and published the book about what might happen. I’m usually often wrong but never in doubt kind of person. I said, “I might be wrong but there is something wrong that is happening here.” People will be caught off guard. I had a friend who is a publisher who took a chance on me. The reason I wrote Six Foot World is when the pandemic was onset, people say, “You need to maintain a 6-foot distance.” I said, “This thing will continue for a very long time.” Several of my friends said, “This is nonsense because it will end in three months, and then this book will be irrelevant quickly.” I said, “I don’t think so.” They said, “Why do you think this is?” I said, “I’m not a doctor and I’m not a futurist, but I studied linguistic philosophy for 7.5 years. When the phenomenon experience is described wrong, everything about it will be wrong or the assessments will be wrong.”

Why do I say it? If you think about it, every big disaster that we have had, the society came back as if nothing happened after a few years post the disaster. That happens on 9/11. Post 9/11, things didn’t come back to normalcy. They underwent a permanent change. The security systems got bolstered, pilots would lock themselves up in the cabin. There is red, blue and all of those kinds of signals. Everything changed. Why? It’s because there is a switch in the internal world that said, “Who knows? One among us may be a terrorist.” Once that switch is internal, the change externally will be semi-permanent.

[bctt tweet=”Be timeless, relevant, actionable, curated and knowledgeable.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Even the concept of social distancing as opposed to physical distancing, I thought once you start flipping that switch that people should be afraid to be connected or be near each other socially as opposed to just stay 6 feet apart. If we’re socially distancing, then it becomes a whole other level of psychological distress. My favorite analogy is one of the worst things they can do to prisoners is put them in solitary confinement.

The post-traumatic stress that people have been experiencing by social distancing, in other words, feeling so isolated from friends and family and meeting new people, once that is switched, it’s going to take a while to heal and recover from that. In this 6-foot world that we’re living in, even after everything might go back to some fewer restrictions in terms of distancing, mask and big events, what do you think is one of the biggest things that people can do? I love the image you have of the kitten is unprepared and the lion is prepared.

If you think about it, we have never met. We both are talking but we never felt that we’ve never met, isn’t it?

Right.

The Right Hustle: The easiest thing to do, whether you’re connected physically or not, is to ask only one question. Do I genuinely care about what they care about?

I’m sure we have many friends like that that you never met, but you always feel connected to them. I always think like this. We have to learn to live in a world however physically disconnected we are, but in the spirit and the mind, we should be fully connected. I’ve worked with several people in my life. One of them is my illustrator, Ming, in Malaysia. I’ve been working with him for around twenty years, but I met him only after sixteen years of working with him. I never felt that I was disconnected because it has to be in the spirit. The easiest thing to do, whether you’re connected physically or not, is to ask only one question. Do I genuinely care about what they care about?

Are the values aligned?

Once you do that, then the physical distance is distilled because we have tools like Zoom and all those things. We have more tools than ever before on this planet that will make you get closer in the spirit and in the mind.

Since you’re all about promoting new ideas, it creates new needs for new projects. For example, when I was speaking to the Olympus Medical sales team, I went from a live event to a virtual event, they said, “Can you also add in some training on how to look and sound good on Zoom calls?” That was never a need before. How do we sell on-camera versus being in person? All those little tips suddenly create another need. If one goes away, another one comes up.

[bctt tweet=”When you reach out to someone, make sure that you give a gift rather than trying to get something from them.” username=”John_Livesay”]

If we think about it, there are only two things. People have concerns or when they are taking care of their concerns, they have breakdowns along the way. That’s what my philosophy teacher taught me. The concerns and the breakdowns while they’re taking care of those concerns are never going to go away as a concept. As soon as you make a change, then the concerns are not going to go away. New concerns will get formed.

Speaking of new concepts, let’s talk about Audvisor, brilliant in three minutes. How did you come to get involved with this startup?

Let’s look at the trend. The trend is people are going to think that they have less and less time. They don’t have less time. I can guarantee you that. They will think they have less and less time. Why? It’s because they’re always connected with people who will want to sell them advertisement or sell them stuff and all those things, but they don’t know that. They always think they’re always connected and it’s a privilege, but it’s a privilege for people who will sell them something. In the process, their time is getting lost and then it becomes this, “I don’t have much time to study. I don’t have much time to grow. I’m always doing something.”

Globalization is not helping, which is you can follow the sun. This means when you sleep, somebody else is working. When they are asleep, you are working and you can do the handoff. In reality, both of them are awake all the time, saying they’re in coordination and all those things. My thinking is with these many changes, the need to learn and grow has never been less. It has to be more and more, but if they have less time, how do they get to learn from some of the world-class experts or top experts? If the only method is to digest your entire book, it’s not possible because you don’t have the time. What if I get the world’s best experts, more than 100 of them, and give their best advice in three minutes or less with zero fluff?

Six Foot World: How to Reimagine the Future in Disruptive Times

It’s laser-focused. Let’s give an example. I recognize so many of these experts who have been guests on my show, everyone from Sam Horn, Dorie Clark to David Meerman Scott, a lot of many smart speakers, thought leaders and authors that people can say, “I don’t have time to read their whole book but I would love to get the essence of it.” It is so powerful. This concept of TRACK is a wonderful acronym. Can you walk us through what that stands for?

It stands for Timely, Relevant, Actionable, Curated Knowledge. It has to be timely and relevant, which means if it has to be relevant for a long time, then the experts or authors that we work with should give timeless advice. That means it should stand the test of time. It has to be actionable and it has to be curated knowledge. Our goal is to deliver the highest wisdom per minute. People say that we want you to spend a lot of time with our app. I said, “No. Don’t spend a lot of time with our app. You can spend 15 minutes per week or even a month. It’s good enough for you.” Why? It’s because we have abstracted the best wisdom in the least possible time, deliver it on the audio, which means that you’ll be eyes-free and hands-free. Just press the button and you can listen to it. There is no excuse for not doing it. What will you say? “I don’t have fifteen minutes a week?” No. You just start to have the discipline.

One of the things I love about Audvisor is that you say, “We perfectly curated a playlist just for you.” I talk to people all the time about the need to think of their brains as a playlist with stories. You don’t have 1 or 2 stories that you tell over and over again. You have multiple stories like a playlist, but in this case, instead of a song, it’s a story that’s relevant to the person you’re speaking to. That requires a lot of practice, curation and being able to have access at a very fast amount of time, “I need to tell this person this story at this moment for them to see themselves in it.” The same thing is true if you start training your brain to absorb a short amount of information, then you can give a quote from someone or something you learned that’s keeping your own knowledge relevant, timely and actionable. People think, “How do you have time to read all these books?” It’s almost the old premise that leaders are readers or readers are leaders, however you like to say that. Now, this is a way to stay cutting edge without exhausting your energy and time.

If you think about it, what is the biggest blind spot that everybody knows but it’s very difficult to do anything about it? It is what you don’t know that you don’t know? You don’t know what to do about it because you don’t know that you don’t know.

[bctt tweet=”Everything that’s there is red, blue, and all of the signals. Everything changed.” username=”John_Livesay”]

You’re in the dark. It’s like when I needed to learn how to make special effects on my virtual presentations. Before that, I didn’t even know that Ecamm existed so I didn’t know what I didn’t know. How am I going to make a Zoom call to 300 or more people engaging, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know? Once I became aware that that was a potential tool, then I had to make the decision, “Am I willing to invest the time and money in it because of my own passion for doing something cutting edge and giving my audiences the best possible experience to keep them engaged?” There’s a whole premise of getting people up from unconscious and competent to “I’m aware that this exists,” to “When do I take action on this? Do I wait until everyone’s using it? Is this a requirement? Do I want to be the kind of person that gives something to people while it’s still new because the wow factor is incredible, and then that’s what makes people remember you and refer you?”

It was one more step deeper. If you think about it, if somebody watches you in action, unless they talk to you in person or in a coaching conversation or sometimes read your book. Let’s say they’re brought you in to help with a big sale. They say to you, “Whatever you want to take inside. We have a $2 million deal. Can you come and help us?” You took that assignment, and then you deliver the best possible pitch. If they don’t know that the underlying theme was how to construct a story with exposition, conflict resolution route. If they don’t know this, they will just conclude, “John is so awesome and he tells amazing stories.” If they say, “Now that you saw him in action, can you please repeat it?” They can’t because they don’t know the ingredients that pertain to what made you awesome. Unless they work with you, read your book or something, it’s not automatically by watching. Nothing happens because that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

I’ve helped an architecture firm, Gensler, win a billion-dollar airport renovation in Pittsburgh. The criteria there was, “We’re going to hire the firm we like the most because you’re all qualified to do the work.” They were like a deer in headlights because they’re used to pitching their designs and hoping that’s enough to win the business, “Likability? Where do we even start?” In addition to helping them tell case stories instead of just presenting before and after pictures of other airports, I worked with them on the team slide to craft a story of origin from each person that made them likable, memorable and gave a sense of their own. It’s one thing to say, “I’m somebody who doesn’t give up.” It’s another to show it a story.

All of those little techniques are something that people can learn and work on. If we start at, “We don’t even know we need to tell stories,” to “Now we know the basics of a story but we still need to be at the blackbelt level of it.” If we’re the only ones telling a story and our competition isn’t, odds are we’re going to win. In this case, they did. If other people start telling stories, then you’re like, “That’s the table stakes. That’s the minimum. Now I have to be a master storyteller to tug at heartstrings.” It’s an ongoing process and your solution Audvisor is certainly another way for people to stay one step ahead of what other people are thinking and doing.

Smart, But Stuck

This is the art of learning as well as a discovery platform. A discovery of what you think you should know, but you didn’t know that you should. For example, if you talk to somebody, let’s say the person on the Wolf of Wallstreet, Jordan Belfort. He will talk about straight-line selling. Maybe that’s useful but if you didn’t even know that such a thing existed that you could use that tool somewhere, you’d have no idea. Maybe it’s about frame control. How do you control the frame? If you didn’t know there was a concept of something called a frame, how will you do it? I created a term called hunger engineering, which means way before you sell something, you have to create the hunger for them to want it. If you never think of it, then you have no clue. They are not tools. First of all, you should know the concept exists, which means somebody has to describe it and put words to it.

I want to talk about your talk, Know Your GQ. I was like, “IQ, EQ and GQ is a fashion magazine.” You have a new definition here of what GQ is. Give us a little hint of what that means so we incentivize to go watch your talk on that.

I gave this talk years ago called Practical Generosity Quotient. I always talk about generosity because that’s a complete advantage that anybody can have with simple changes to their mindset, skillset and the way they do their relationship building. The practical generosity quotient is very simple. It’s the ratio of the capacity you added to the capacity that was needed by someone to make a meaningful thing gets done. For example, somebody wants to write a book. We know the capacity that is needed was 100. Somebody comes to return sixteen books and said, “Can you help me here?” I said, “No problem.” When you want to write a book, you pick a topic, go to Amazon and search on the topic. See the books that come out and look at the top three ones. Read them and you’ll get inspired.”

Be as advised. The capacity you added was 1 out of the 100 that was needed. I can do this very same thing differently. Somebody comes to me. I know what is required for a publisher. It’s like a proposal. I have the best proposal template that anybody can have. I select it and do the proposal. I’ve given talks about writing a book. I’ve written a book about how to write a book fast. I have a video course material and a book called Writing Zero. I give them all of those and say, “Why don’t you take a month or something, read it and then we’ll have a discussion over breakfast or Zoom. I’ll help you come through the content. I’ll create a mind map for you.” Now the capacity I added was way more than 50 out of 100. Imagine if everybody did this to the other person by the PGQ. How much capacity are they’re adding to the capacity that was needed to get a meaningful project or meaningful action done? It will be a different way we look at the world.

It is indeed a wonderful new way to look at the world. Your startup or many that you’re involved with Audvisor, one of your many books, the Six Foot World, one of your many courses, The Right Hustle, and now the generosity quotient. Thank you so much for sharing all of this wisdom with us. If people want to follow you on social media or find out more about the book and the course, where should we go?

My website, RajeshSetty.com.

Thank you so much. It’s been a thrill and an honor to get to spend time with you.

Thank you so much, John.

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Tags: connecting with people, Generosity, Generosity Quotient, Learning, networking, Right Hustle

The Right Hustle With Rajesh Setty

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The Right Hustle With Rajesh Setty

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