Transcript: Business Expert Natalie Dawson on DOAC Podcast

What’s the scale of the business and what does it do?

NATALIE DAWSON: Yeah. Over the last six years, I co-founded two businesses that are both nine figures today. One is a management consulting investment firm. It’s called Cardone Ventures, and we help small business owners grow and scale their organizations.

So I work with business owners on a daily basis who will be doing $3 million in annual revenue. They want to know, how do I become one of the fewer that is able to have a $5 million a year business or $10 million a year business? Because they really realize that $3 million a year doesn’t actually create financial security. And that business was started in 2019.

And then our second business, 10X Health, we purchased a health business back in 2023 and today is helping people all over the world and it’s a nine-figure business.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So on that first business, how many business owners have you worked with?

NATALIE DAWSON: Total business owners that have come through our programs would be over 15,000.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are the range of things you’re helping them with?

NATALIE DAWSON: Great question. So there’s education, there’s consulting, there’s services, and there’s investing. So think of us like the McKinsey for small businesses.

We reverse engineer their current market, what they’re doing, what their products, services, offerings are, and we give back to them, either in the form of actual services, where we will do their marketing for them, we will recruit people for them, we will do their books for them.

But then we also have a massive events component of our business where we train business owners on how to hire, how to recruit themselves so they don’t need to hire us to do it. I actually prefer it when people don’t hire us to do this because I think it’s so important for business owners and the leaders inside those teams to actually get the competence in that skill.

So if you use hiring or their books, if business owners don’t understand how to read a P&L and the importance of a balance sheet, they’re always going to abdicate that work to somebody else. And at some point that is not going to work for them any longer because “I don’t actually know what that skill is. So I’m trusting that Steven can come into my business. Steven seems great. I know him from church. I’m just going to let Steven do this.”

But I don’t know that Steven only knows how to do this to a $3 million business, and I need it to be a $10 million business. There’s no education system that exists for business owners to help them identify that today.

The Most Important Lesson: People Are Everything

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it was 2019 you started this business. So if I jumped back to 2019, what is the difference, the fundamental difference in the principles of how to be successful in business that you know now that you wouldn’t have known then?

What are the glaring principles? I often think that the further you go down any path, it becomes more and more clear what the fundamental rules of the game are. And at the very beginning those are just hypotheses.

So what are the fundamental things you’ve learned about what differentiates those 15,000 people that you’ve interfaced with that are business owners? What makes some of them successful and the others unsuccessful?

NATALIE DAWSON: I ultimately think that this comes down to the character of the person that is doing the business. Because if you look at people that you can partner with in business, it is incredibly challenging to make something truly successful, even if it’s the best business model in the world.

You figured out marketing, you figured out operations, you can scale it. If the person is a piece of shit and if the person is not somebody who is ethical and is somebody who’s compliant and isn’t somebody who wants to win, to me, those three things go hand in hand.

Because to me, it doesn’t matter what the business model is. You could give me a roofing business, you could give me an HVAC business, you can give me a wellness company, a marketing agency. The principles that I thought to be true, many of them have held true over the last six years, since 2019.

Many of them are still very applicable around standard practices for accounting and how you recruit people. Certain tips and tools help with different platforms that you can use for these things. But for the most part, those things actually haven’t changed.

But what I’ve learned painfully over the last six years is everything is about the people that you do business with and the partners that you choose and the people that you allow in your inner circle.

And so that is the case for your own business, but that’s also the case for the businesses that we help. And I can watch the most incredible business owner come into our organization. She’s wanting to win. She’s excited about what the future can look like. She’s going to take all of the notes and actually go home and implement those things.

But if she has somebody in her life, say it’s a spouse, say it’s a kid, worse yet, it’s an employee that she’s paying to help her—that’s the irony. You pay people to help you and yet when they’re actually on your team, they do things that detract from your ability to achieve your goals and to reach your potential.

That’s where I find it doesn’t matter what the business model is. Doesn’t matter. You can give all of the books, all of the training, the full playbook to somebody. They’re going to fail because either they aren’t that person or they’ve surrounded themselves inside their business with people who will just be stops to them and continually stop their ability to grow and to reach for more, reducing that person’s confidence in themselves and their business stays stuck.

The Three-Step Interview Process

STEVEN BARTLETT: If people are the most important thing for long-term success and for business, what are you looking for in people? What makes someone an A player in your view and how do you filter them out?

Because a lot of people go off their vibes and if I’ve learned anything over the last 10 years is that we’re all riddled with our own biases and insecurities so we end up aiming in a certain direction, whether that’s for better or for worse. So what’s your process of finding exceptional people?

NATALIE DAWSON: I use a three-step interview process. So the three steps for me is first a cultural interview. I want to understand more so than me trying to get into the technicalities of “can they do the work?” Are they aligned with our organization? Are they goal-oriented?

The best question that you can ask somebody inside a business before you hire them: what are their five-year goals? And actually get a real answer. I don’t really care what skills and experiences you have. If you don’t have goals, I’m not hiring you.

You’re not allowed to be inside this environment because it’s demoralizing for every other person who is here to help achieve their goals, the organization’s goals, and hopefully the goals of the end customer, client, patient, for whatever type of business.

So that first interview really being the cultural grounding point is of the utmost importance. And then I move straight into a technical interview where I want to get the person as close to the work as possible.

So if you’re going to be a salesperson, I want to see you make a sales call. I’m going to give you a list of 50 people to call. I want to listen to you call those people.

If you are a graphic designer in our organization, we do not do briefs. We are not the type of people that are going to say, “you get all of this time to be able to think through this whole process and this whole journey and we’re going to give you two weeks to do this for us.”

We are churning content constantly because that’s the world that we live in. For the amount of ads that need to be created, presentation decks, it can’t take a bunch of time.

And so if the person, when I do a case study interview and I have them actually make a presentation in front of me, says that they need two days to think about this and they can’t assemble some form of a presentation or a graphic for an ad, they don’t know how to use Adobe or Canva or whatever this platform is, I can’t really hire the person because I know that they don’t have that skill.

And then the final one is a core values interview. And for me, our team’s ability to demonstrate ahead of time, ahead of joining the organization, that they actually understand and are in alignment with our core values is essential.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you test someone’s core values?

NATALIE DAWSON: Well, I ask them to give me times where they have exemplified the core values that we have, and they present it to our leadership team. For the first hundred team members at Cardone Ventures, I listened to every single core values presentation.

If the person can’t demonstrate and actually say, “oh, I was able to generate X amount of leads and convert them at Y percentage,” they probably don’t know what they’re talking about and they’re going to have a really hard time in the environment.

And I do believe that this is the business owner’s responsibility. You have to own your culture and your environment. And if you don’t and just think that anybody that can come in is going to actually live by what you want to create, you’re going to be very quickly mistaken because they’re going to create their own environment inside yours and then you’ve lost control.

The PPF Framework: Personal, Professional, Financial Goals

STEVEN BARTLETT: You talked about goal setting being an imperative when you’re meeting people. What is your framework for goal setting? If someone at home isn’t quite clear on their goals, what should they be doing?

NATALIE DAWSON: I have a three-step methodology for goal setting that I have rolled out to thousands of people. And this three-step framework has really transformed my life because it allows me to create buckets for goals.

And the process is called personal goals, professional goals, and financial goals. And after having over a thousand of these conversations personally, where I’ve interviewed team members and business owners and team members of business owners about their goals, what I can say is I’ve never found a goal that is outside of those three buckets.

But the challenge many people run into is on New Year’s Eve, they start to list out all of the lovely things that they would like to accomplish and who they want to be. And it becomes this very esoteric conversation.

Instead of really prioritizing: personally, what does success look like? Professionally, what does success look like? Financially, what does success look like? And what would those targets be in one year from now, three years from now, and five years from now?

Because those three buckets become easy to think about in the short term. One year for most people, super straightforward. They’re like, “oh, I’d like to make an additional $10,000. Maybe I’d like a promotion here.”

Three years starts to get a little bit more nebulous. And after having over a thousand of these conversations, five years for most people, they have a hard time thinking with.

But the one constant is in five years from now, guess what? We’re going to be five years older. I am 32 years old today. In five years from now, for certain, I will be 37 years old. And so who is Natalie at 37?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Who is she?

NATALIE DAWSON: She’s a f*ing badass. Natalie is in control of her environment. Natalie is able to make a lot of financial investments that I’m not in the position financially to make today. Because I want to be able to write a million dollar check to charity just because I can. I’d ideally like that check to be $10 million or $50 million.

The PPF Framework Structure

STEVEN BARTLETT: And when you say PPF, personal, professional, financial, is there any specific way that I should write this down? Is it just, do I just think about in five years from now, what are my personal, professional and financial goals? And then I write that down on a piece of paper, for example?

NATALIE DAWSON: Great question. Ideally personal’s at the top with a bucket for one year, three year and five year, then the next is professional, one year, three year, five year, financial, one year, three year, five year.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you know, you use the word badass.

NATALIE DAWSON: Uh huh.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the mindset of a badass? Have you always been like this?

Overcoming Anxiety and Fear

NATALIE DAWSON: I always wanted this, but today I am this. At 20 years old I was crippled with anxiety and fear about what others thought of me, about this decision that I made to be in a relationship with somebody who was older than me and thinking that for the rest of my life somebody was going to think that, “Oh, she just married her way to the top, she slept her way to success. She’s not actually very smart, she’s just a gold digger and she took the easy way out.”

And so 20 year old me was actually terrified of being in front of people, was terrified of the future judgment that would come if I was successful. Because I think there was a part of me that thought to myself, “Well, what if I am only successful because I married somebody who is successful?”

And all of the thought process that goes around, “Well, do I not marry this person and be in this relationship even though I love them and I think they’re the greatest person on earth because what people are going to think of me? What if I could have the greatest relationship because I’m obsessed with this person? I really think that this person is my person.” I had that clarity at a very young age.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And he’s 25 years older than you, Brad.

NATALIE DAWSON: He is 25 years older than me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you were anxious and more concerned with other people’s opinions?

NATALIE DAWSON: 100%.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you have the same aura? I don’t think so. What changed? What happened? How did you acquire such an aura?

Building First-Party Evidence

NATALIE DAWSON: I think the aura came from targeting, getting stats that I could prove that let somebody not see me and my life choices but actually let them see an outcome. So that first outcome was being able to recruit people. I wanted to actually have a stat that I have recruited X amount of people.

Therefore I know how to hire people, I know how to interview them, I know how to onboard them, I know how to create a successful culture because a result shows that. So whether you like me, don’t like me, think that it was him, you can’t take away the stat. And I became obsessed with not getting things or doing things that took me away from stats.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you needed to acquire first party evidence for yourself, about yourself so that within yourself you knew who you were, that you had a self case for who you are. And even I guess for people to do that because I’m sure there’s so many people listening that are maybe 20 year old Natalie, in some way, maybe a bit shrouded with certain insecurities and maybe aren’t the most confident, maybe a bit anxious, scared about what people might think if they try. What would you say to those people?

NATALIE DAWSON: From your experience, go all in on yourself, go all in on that weird thing that you’re interested in. If it’s scrapbooking, if it’s social media, if it’s recruiting, if you like reading business books, go all in on that thing.

And social media has never created a better time for people to actually create incredible things based off of their own interests and get those things out to the world. So 20 year old anybody, anybody who is 20 years old should say, “This is what I’m interested in. It is one thing, it is not 12 things. And I’m going to go all in on myself with this thing and become completely obsessed and create my environment around becoming the best at objectively the best at this thing.”

Rebranding Your Look

STEVEN BARTLETT: Does it matter how you look? I’ve heard you talk about this in a video you made in April where you’re talking about seven steps to transforming yourself and you say that you should rebrand your look. Does it matter how I look?

NATALIE DAWSON: I think it matters a lot to people how they look. I think people have a lot of ideas about levels of acceptance about how they look and ultimately you have to decide if you are comfortable with the way that you look. And I do think many people overemphasize how they look and how they come across.

But if you want to rebrand yourself and have this new identity, let’s say somebody wants to go from being a 20 year old college student that no one really takes seriously and kind of dumpy and doesn’t really like certain things, but can’t really articulate why, spend too much time on social media. And let’s say that person wants to become a professional golfer.

Well, all of a sudden, in order for me to become a professional golfer, the fastest way for me to be successful becoming a professional golfer is to practice golf every hour of the day and to assimilate into that environment, to look the part and to act the part.

I’m a huge believer in the process of be, do, have. It is not have before you actually be that person and you do the things in order to have the stuff or have the identity or have the whatever it is that you’re looking to create. The being a professional golfer, the scrapbooking business, the $20 million organization.

And so the first step really is becoming that. And if I really want to change what my external environment is, I need to get in those rooms and I need to start to understand what those rooms look like. And the fastest way for me to actually be able to do that, as long as it doesn’t compromise my moral code, would be to start to look like, dress like, act like that thing that I want to become.

The Power of Effective Communication

STEVEN BARTLETT: How important do you think communication is in terms of the way that you show up here and the way that you talk? Do you think that’s important? And if so, what advice would you give to my audience about being an effective communicator?

NATALIE DAWSON: Of course, communication is the most important thing next to being successful. Actually, I would say in order to be successful, you have to be able to communicate your ideas and your thoughts and who you are and your point of view. And if you can’t communicate those things, it will show in your inability to create the things that you want to have.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what do you do when you think about your own communication style? What are some of the things that you’ve learned over time that are effective to make people take you seriously, to hear you, and to persuade people?

Being Present in the Room

NATALIE DAWSON: I am incredibly present in any room that I am in and that is a missed skill in a day and age where everyone has a cell phone, where they can contact millions of people instantly. I find that leaders who want to get promoted and be in the next position, they don’t even think of how unaware they look in every leadership meeting because they are simply answering another email or not in that room.

And my philosophy is if you’re in the room and your two feet are there, that is where you have to be. And so you are an effective communicator if you can actually track with what’s happening. If I can track what he’s doing over here, and when he comes and talks to me, I’m able to have a conversation because he’s physically in my space, that communication matters.

It’s not just the most important person in the room that matters, in any room. It’s how you present yourself to every individual, because you are present in that environment right now. And if you can teach yourself to not numb yourself from the environment, if you can teach yourself to really observe the environment and talk to whoever it is that’s in front of you, communicate with them, even if they’re not talking to you.

How we became partners with Grant and Elena Cardone was by sitting at an event with 35,000 people. And instead of acting like big deals, and instead of acting like we were somebody, we sat there in their audience and took notes and were actively interested in what they were saying. Why? Because if somebody’s up on stage and you want that person’s attention, the fastest way to make them not want to spend time with you is to slouch in your chair and is to look down or be distracted the whole time.

And then when they meet you to come, maybe take a picture at the end of the event, they see you, they’re going to know that you gave them no laughs, you gave them no verbal cues, you were completely uninterested, and you actually made their job harder for them, despite the fact that maybe they’re your role model or idol.

I find people are so unaware of their physical presence in any room, in a meeting, in a school room, in a presentation, in a conversation with their significant other, with their kids, that if they could just own the space that they are in and be intentional with the human being that’s in front of them, would change everything in their lives.

Using Frameworks to Communicate

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about how you speak? The very, the most effective speakers that you’ve encountered, what it is they do tactically to make sure that people hear what they’re saying and are persuaded by them. And there’s a spectrum, right? There’ll be these business owners that you meet that are terrible communicators and speakers, what are they doing wrong? And then the very best that you meet, what are they doing right?

NATALIE DAWSON: The more frameworks somebody has to frame their communication, I think helps them land their point. So there’s no shortages of frameworks on the planet. My framework is vision, commitment, execution. I use three steps and every communication that I’m really intentional about and wanting to land.

And that three step framework can be used for getting a promotion. It could be used for laying people off. It could be used to figuring out where you’re going to go to dinner that night and persuading your significant other.

So the first step of the framework under VCE is vision. And it’s important that vision is first, because if you can articulate to somebody the intention and the why behind whatever it is you’re communicating, you’re going to get much further than just going into tactics. And if it’s tactic that you go into, people forget it. People don’t remember tactics. They like the tips, but do they actually implement those things? Oftentimes not, because it’s just tactics. So why is this thing important for the individual?

The VCE Framework in Action

STEVEN BARTLETT: So give me an example. I’m on your team and you’re trying to persuade me to launch Twitch Channel to do live streaming. How would you go through this framework to accomplish that goal?

NATALIE DAWSON: Cardone Ventures. Our mission is to help business owners achieve their personal, professional, financial goals. And we’re on a path to impact a million business owners. We’ve only done business with a handful of thousands. We have a long way to go.

And one of the things I was researching is Twitch, because our impact could be greatly amplified by us having our message be to this audience, to this crowd. Using Twitch Vision, commitment is two steps.

First step, what is my commitment? I will provide you whatever training is the best training to get you set up with an account, to get you the knowledge and education of people who are crushing it in the space, introduce you to those contacts in order for you to be able to fully launch this and be responsible for it.

Commitment Part 2. What I’d ask for in return is you take that very seriously. And with the contacts that you’re going to be meeting, you follow up with them. You ensure that they understand that your intention is to be the best of the best, to learn from their mistakes, but to do this in a way that represents our organization at the highest level possible execution.

So what I see this looking like is we’re going to get you an account. I’ve researched this platform. I know nothing about Twitch, but I’ve researched this platform and here are the three people that I’m going to invest $5,000 for you to go and learn from, be mentored.

And over the next eight weeks, the target has to be, we’re going to go from zero Twitch subscribers to 10,000 Twitch subscribers. And we will check in every single day in order to remove any roadblocks in order for this to be a successful initiative.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And where do people go wrong here?

The Execution Trap

NATALIE DAWSON: They start with the execution. They’re like, “Oh, we need to be on Twitch.” This is what the business owners do to their team. They’re like, “I came home from this conference. We need to be on Twitch. So figure out what Twitch is going to look like, figure out what the plan is. We’ll meet back, talk about it. Just handle this. I’m super busy. I have to do this thing over here.”

Instead of really tying whatever the thing is that you’re asking somebody to, why is this important? Oh, yeah, it ties back to this bigger thing. It’s not just because I’m asking you to learn Twitch, which is likely something that you know jack shit about. You know nothing about Twitch, as do I.

But that’s this difficulty in businesses and in many communication outside of business. You’re both trusting that you’re going to do your part in learning about something that neither of you know anything about. And so you either again, bottleneck yourself in this communication because you’re struggling to understand this thing. You’re struggling to understand Twitch. And then you feel like you have to become a Twitch master. People online are going to love this. No idea.

But you’re going to become the world’s greatest Twitch person. When really what you should have been doing is these other things for your business and this person you should trust enough, but lay out enough steps for them to say, “This is why I’m committed to this. It’s important enough for me to invest $5,000. That’s my commitment.”

What I’m asking for in return is your commitment back to me so that we’re aligned. And once I have your commitment, I’ve already given you mine. Let’s just hop right into execution. But so often we jog right into execution without first getting the commitment from the other person that they’re even interested.

And then we wait four weeks or eight weeks or 12 weeks thinking something is happening when it is not happening. And we lose time, momentum, excitement, enthusiasm about growing and our confidence in people that we can actually trust them goes down.

High Conviction Communication

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve heard you talk about avoiding phrases like “I think,” “I feel,” and being more high conviction and certain with the way that you communicate with people. Explain that to me.

NATALIE DAWSON: That honestly might be outdated for me because in a day and age where it’s important to share your point of view, it’s not a bad thing to say, “I think this is the right path,” especially if you aren’t certain and it shows strength and integrity that you are communicating that you’re thinking this, you don’t know for sure and you’re relying on other people.

Now, if it is just a filler word, if somebody says, “I think we should do this and this is the direction that I think we should take, Cardone Ventures,” that wouldn’t be very engaging. So in that context, you absolutely should not be using these filler phrases of “I think” or “maybe” and adding lack of certainty.

At some level, you’re playing a certainty game with everybody around you, whether they are investors, clients, patients, team members, partners, vendors. And so using phrases that decrease people’s certainty in your direction isn’t going to help them help you. But if you actually are uncertain, it is okay to be transparent about that and it actually builds trust.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think it’s funny. I just said “I think.” I think about this a lot because I find myself writing out emails and messages where I’ve written “I think” in them, and I’d say 90% of the time change it to “I believe.” And I think there’s something different about that framing.

Whenever I believe, it feels, it’s still appreciating that this is a belief that I have and I don’t have certainty on this hypothesis. But there’s something high conviction about the phrase “I believe we’re going to blah, blah, blah, blah,” and “I believe that will happen.” It feels much better than “I think.” I think it’s a bit flimsy.

NATALIE DAWSON: I’m in agreement with you, a bit.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Plastic, bang in the wind, so.

NATALIE DAWSON: But when you say it like this, it makes me connect to you because it actually feels like it’s a stream of consciousness that you are thinking something instead of in an email. You saying “I believe” is much more authoritative.

I would caution leaders when it comes to using words like “I believe” or being certain about really ensuring that you are certain or you really do believe something, especially as your business grows. If you’re doing a million dollars and now you have a $10 million business and all of a sudden you have a layer of leaders around you, it can become an echo chamber.

And the more certain you are, or at least you seem to be, the less likely people are going to push back on you when you might actually need them to collaborate. And you weren’t so certain, but you came off with such certainty. And I find that that’s a balance that leaders have to find as they become more competent in their zone of genius.

And as they get higher up in organizations or start their own organization themselves, if they aren’t really communicating what things they aren’t certain of but they’re waffling on, it can cause unnecessary duress.

Mastering Your Calendar

STEVEN BARTLETT: You talk about mastering your calendar as well being central to transformation. Why is this so important and what does that mean?

NATALIE DAWSON: Well, if you want anything in life, you actually have to spend time to get that thing. Things don’t just magically manifest into people’s lives, despite what the Internet tells you.

So in order for me to have the relationship that I want to have, I actually have to invest time with my significant other. It’s not just going to magically happen that I’m going to have an amazing marriage. If I want to have great friends, I actually have to spend time with my friends.

And so your calendar is a reflection and a representation of what you find to be important and is in alignment or out of alignment with the goals that you have every single day. So if I have zero time being spent on generating revenue inside my business, it shouldn’t surprise me at the end of the year that I’m doing the same amount of revenue that I did last year. Why? I spent zero time on the one thing, AKA revenue generation, in order for it to grow.

So for me, my calendar, and I teach business owners this every single day, you have to look at it every day. You have to start to align your time. Unless you want your life to be something that just is a story of luck. I don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in having a life of luck because I think that actually leads to a significant amount of self doubt and uncertainty.

“Oh, just because I’m lucky, I’m going to leave something to act to.” Being out of my control just because I happen to be at the right place, the right time. Of course there are those components. I have been at the right place at the right time throughout my career.

But the way that you control where you spend your time gives you the most amount of at bats to the opportunities that you want, if you have goals and aspirations, to have a different life than you currently have. And to me, still to this day, I want to have a different life in the future. And I imagined a more enriched version of my life at 40 and at 50 and at 60.

And I think if people were really honest with themselves, they want a different version of their lives too. I don’t think someone listens to this podcast or watches this show without wanting to be something different or to have something different, whether it’s relationship or different health situation or different income, different friends.

I mean, how many people would want different friends, like badass friends, to do cool shit with? Well, how do you get that? Okay, I would need to actually reverse engineer using my time and what I do every single day to get me closer to people who are doing those similar things.

And so that might actually take me making sacrifices for two years in order to be able to be around people, to be able to give value to people who’d be interested in being my friend. And it sounds a little strategic, but it is. Because you don’t just get great people in your life because you happen to be at the right place at the right time.

You get great people by doing great things because great people want to spend time around other people who are doing great things. And the only way that you can certainly know that you are doing great things without getting lucky or happening to look a certain way so that you get invited into certain places is by managing and really creating your own time.

The Importance of Hard Work

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about hard work in this equation? You know, people talk a lot about work-life balance. And I think a lot of people want everything. We want to get to 40, have the great family, have great relationships, have a great business. I mean, that’s an ideal outcome for all of us. What would you say to people about the concept of working hard and how critical or unimportant that is?

NATALIE DAWSON: Working hard is the most important thing. You cannot get to where you want to go if it’s truly something that is unusual or out of the ordinary without working hard. And you could try to hack it. Let’s say somebody happens to be beautiful. I guess you could get the yacht and a relationship because you’re beautiful. And somebody is willing to be in a relationship with you because you’re a good person.

But I’ve met those people, and those people have crippling fear and anxiety because they don’t actually know what their place is. And they don’t know they didn’t do what was required to have the thing.

So going back to, like, be, do, have. People who win the lottery, they have all the money. People who inherit wealth, they have all the money. This was my fear. I was going to have money because I’m connected to my husband, but I didn’t do the work and become the person that created the happiness until I did do the work to become the person to have the thing. So now that I have it, I can actually have it.

And when you are able in life to have things that you want because you did it in the right order, you don’t have this anxiousness, you don’t have this anxiety, you don’t have this worry or fear that someone’s going to take it from you. It’s all going to come crashing down because you know that you could redo it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If I want to be badass Natalie at 32, how hard am I going to have to work in my 20s? And I want very specifics, like, you know, because people, everyone has a different idea of hard work. I think if you ask anybody if they work hard, I think 100% of the population will say, “Yes, I do.” But actually there’s levels to this shit. So how hard do you work? If we look at an average week. Why are you smiling?

NATALIE DAWSON: I’m never not working. So however many hours are in a day, everything in my life is optimized to the work that I do. Every single thing. Because the work that I do is important to me. And I’m in a phase of my life where I really do believe that the work that I’m doing can change my life. It can change others’ lives. So it would be selfish of me to not spend every minute thinking about what I can do in order to help move the work that I do that I’m passionate about.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about clothing and stuff? And do you have any hobbies, anything you do to when you’re not working?

The Value of Responsibility and Hard Work

NATALIE DAWSON: I love a facial. Facials are great. That’s the extent of hobbies. I don’t have hobbies. I truly love what I do every single day. I get to work with the backbone of America. I get to work with business owners who need my help, who are very confused. And so I feel a huge sense of responsibility every single day to actually make decisions that if I had Sarah looking over my shoulder, listening to how I’m talking to my husband, and Sarah works with her husband, like would she actually think, “Oh, she is the person that she says she is because of the way that Natalie showed up to this conversation.”

And if you have this responsibility, and I would recommend anybody like manufacture in every way possible responsibility. Put more responsibility on yourself. Feel the weight of responsibility because it’s important and there’s nothing wrong with responsibility. We should want responsibility because people who have responsibility, what does that mean? They’re able to respond.

Well, I don’t want to be unable to respond to anything. I want to be the first phone call when somebody is having a crisis. I want to be the first phone call when somebody is celebrating something. I want to be capable and able to respond. And so the idea of hard work, to me it’s just a requirement because I have responsibility.

And anybody who is trying to shortcut the hard work, you have to figure out almost how to gamify it for yourself and put different ways of, I guess, creating pressure and responsibility to keep yourself going through it. Because sometimes it is frustrating and overwhelming and never burnout inducing though. And I think that that’s a misconception about hard work.

I don’t know successful people who are still in the game who are burnt out by a long day. The response isn’t burnout. Their response might be, “I want to go do something different for a minute.” But my business partner, Grant Cardone, who I am obsessed with and that was one of the greatest partnerships I could have ever done in my entire life, he says, “You’re not a candle, you can’t burn out.”

A human being cannot burn out because you are not a candle. So can you feel moments of pressure, stress? Yes. I don’t take any of those moments as being a bad thing. It’s not a negative to feel overwhelmed because you have responsibility. People depend on you. People are relying on you to do something great.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what is burnout then, in your view? Why do people say, “Do you know, I was doing this thing and I got burnt out.” What is that?

Understanding Burnout and Goal Setting

NATALIE DAWSON: The thing that people do is not actually leading to where they want to go. So if I thought that it was going to require me to work out two hours a day in the gym and only eat chicken and rice and never have any of the things that I love, to never get a six pack, I’m not going to do that.

But if I think that by doing this work that’s going to be hard and I’m going to hate and it’s going to suck, that I can actually get what I want and my life would be changed because I’d actually have a six pack and I’d feel confident, I’d be able to buy the clothes that I’d want and I’d just be part of the very small percentage of the population that has one, then the process of me going to the gym early at 5 o’clock before my kids get up wouldn’t burn me out. I would recognize that this is a step that’s necessary to get to my goal.

And at which point when the goal is there, you might change your mind and you might have a different goal. But when people win, they are rarely burnt out at that moment. I’ve watched business owners sell their businesses for hundreds of millions of dollars. I’ve watched them get hundreds of millions of dollars in their bank account. And that feeling of celebration and joy happens to stay around for a little while until that thing kicks in, which is that individual’s potential to help somebody, to solve more problems, to be able to make a larger impact.

And so that end goal does end up moving. The goalpost ends up moving. And there’s actually nothing wrong with that. Despite the world wanting to tell you that there is something wrong with the fact that you’re moving the goalpost, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.

And you only really get burnt out if you don’t see how the sacrifices that you’re making are actually going to lead you to the six pack. If you’re going to be overweight forever, then of course I’m just going to eat candy and chips and all the things that I love to eat. But I do think I can get a six pack. So I’m willing to make some of these sacrifices here and there because the goal isn’t going to allow me to get burnt out. Because I’m going to be so frickin’ proud of myself by the time I reach that goal. At which point I’m going to change it to a different goal and it’s going to be just as interesting and exciting of a game for me to play at that point in my life.

Balancing Work and Parenting

STEVEN BARTLETT: We talked about responsibility earlier and you work seven days a week all the time, but only take time off for facials. I know my audience well enough to know that some of them will be thinking, “That’s all right for you, you haven’t got kids.”

NATALIE DAWSON: Totally.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you respond to that rebuttal? For people that have, you know, lots of other responsibilities, they’re right.

NATALIE DAWSON: You can have kids and be a great parent and also work a lot. And so then your hobby, instead of me getting a facial, would be you actually spending intentional time with your kids. But I would ask them this question: what is the appropriate amount of time to spend with your kids? How much is that? What would make you feel good about how much time you spent with your kids?

Is it two hours a day? Okay, great. Two hours, focused time, dedicated time. Not four hours, half of that on television, on social media, making calls, making dinner. No, that’s not workable. Two hours makes sense. Or three hours, whatever that person’s goal is with the amount of time that they want to spend being an active parent, being somebody actively involved in that person’s life.

But we tend to just use these excuses. “Oh, I have sick parents. Oh, I have kids. Oh, I have…” And I find that very successful people happen to have all of those “Oh, I haves.” And many of them, not all of them, but many of them are able to figure out, “Okay, I’m going to spend this 90 minutes at the hospital fully locked in to my dad right now.”

My dad doesn’t actually need me for six hours. My dad needs me for 90 minutes. That time is precious. It’s blocked off. I’m making the time for that. And then outside of that, it is working in order to build the life that you want. Because guess what? Your dad is going to pass away. If your dad passes away in a year from now, in six years from now, the amount of time that you spent with him needs to be important enough for you to make that time.

And I would hope that everybody makes the amount of time that is necessary for them to feel like they did their job as the child, did their job as the caretaker, whatever the role is. But at what point are you going to use other people’s circumstances to stop you from doing what you want to do and creating what you want to have?

And for the parent who is very intentional with their kids and doesn’t use their kids as an excuse, I am all for spending as much time as required for you to be a good parent. It’s that I find that the other side is far more prevalent, which is I’m using my kids, I’m using my family, I’m using my circumstances, I’m using my education, my lack of experience as a reason for why I can’t do this thing.

And when I find people, because I work with people all day, every day, when I find people like that, the fastest way to handle that is be like, “Hey, Sarah, let me see your phone real fast.” Sarah will give me her phone and I’ll open up the screen time on her phone. And if the screen time on her phone has three hours of Netflix or an hour and a half of Instagram, just reallocate that time to the thing that you want to go build.

Use your calendar, use your time for building the life that you actually want to have. Instead of saying, “Oh, I have kids,” while also being distracted with your kids and not being a parent, whatever that definition for you is, a parent to them.

I don’t think that kids are negatively impacted by watching their parents work their asses off. I think that that is an inspiring way to grow up. I had two parents who worked their tails off. And I do think that I am part of the way that I am because I had such incredible parents who worked hard and who prioritized their own goals and their own success as something that was important.

And I would also argue it should be more important than I am. Just because you’re a parent shouldn’t mean that your kids are the most important thing in your life and you have to over index on spending all of your time there.

Success and Happiness: Are They the Same?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What matters more, in your view, being happy and content with your life or being successful, even if it comes at the cost of contentment?

NATALIE DAWSON: They’re the same thing. They’re not different. I do not find success and happiness on two polar opposites. I am happy when I create things and when I can see in the physical universe that I’ve done something that I wanted to do. Whether that’s driving revenue, hiring people, helping a business owner. That is when I am the happiest, when I am doing the things that are part of becoming successful.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if Sarah, who’s scrolling on Netflix…

NATALIE DAWSON: Is content and happy, she’s not content or happy, though.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How’d you know?

NATALIE DAWSON: Because what is she watching? Is she watching Selling Sunset and watching other people live their lives and touring these gorgeous homes and having these fancy things that Sarah would love to have if she really thought she could have those things, if she really actually believed that for a second. And these are the steps that are part of getting there, I do believe that she would choose actually having it versus watching it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess it depends what it comes at the expense of. Because I know a bunch of billionaires and they’re not amongst the happiest people I know sometimes. I mean, there’s the odd one or two that I think are really happy and content. But then I’ve got friends that live in my hometown who I think are probably happier and that never, you know, have a 9 to 5 job, et cetera. And I would say they’re probably happier.

So the house in my mind doesn’t strike me as being the source of everyone’s happiness. Even though for you and maybe even for me, maybe that is. The pursuit of those things gives us some kind of stability because of our own trauma and our own wiring and our own insecurities, et cetera. But for Sarah, maybe she had such a cushy, lovely upbringing and she felt so safe and secure in that she wasn’t without that. Maybe she’s perfectly happy just vicariously watching Netflix and walking her dog.

NATALIE DAWSON: I refuse to believe that that’s possible.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

NATALIE DAWSON: Yeah. Sarah is slapped in the face as soon as she leaves that nice little escape that she’s created for herself of Netflix, of all of the things that she can’t have and that she can’t do and the experiences she can’t create for herself that she could never give to people around her because she was distracted and not actually building what she wanted to build.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Maybe that’s what she wanted to build, though.

NATALIE DAWSON: A life of watching other people’s lives on social media?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Netflix. People like watching movies and stuff and they like scrolling and, you know, they like cooking and then do a bit of crochet, then walk the dog and spend time with the kids. People like that.

When I was younger, you know, when I was like 18, 19, 20, 25, whatever, I didn’t think it was possible. I thought that everyone was pretending that they were happy. But as I got older and as I started to realize that I’m a bit f*ed up, it became more and more clear to me that actually, had the circumstances of my earlier life been slightly different, I wouldn’t be the way that I am, and I wouldn’t want the things that I think I want, and I wouldn’t get the contentment and stability from the pursuit of things.

And so it’s plausible. If you even look at your siblings, you go, “Well, how are we all so different? Like, you know, why am I working seven days a week every single day, and some of my siblings choose not to?” It’s because we have different wiring and we get happiness from different things. And some of the things they do, I go, “Oh, God, I’d hate that. My brain would be going crazy thinking about email.” You don’t think Sarah can be happy?

The Dependencies We Create

NATALIE DAWSON: I don’t think Sarah’s happy watching Netflix and on social media. I think that there is a deep sense of insecurity and lack of contentment that’s guised as “I’m happy,” and that’s guised as or covered of. It’s almost like a facade. I’m going to say that I’m happy, but the realities of our economy and the realities of her financial situation create dependencies.

For Sarah, it creates dependencies. And with those dependencies, what I found is that the things that you are dependent upon, at some level, you will end up resenting. If I’m dependent upon my one customer in my business and they make up 80% of my revenue, sure, it’s great when I sign that deal. It’s really sucky when that customer ends up being a jerk, because now I’m dependent upon them, 80% of my revenue, until I’m not dependent upon them because I’ve diversified my revenue and I’ve been able to bring on other customers because I was able to market my business and acquire an audience.

And so with Sarah, I would ask if the median household income is around $60,000, shy of $70,000 a year, what is Sarah dependent upon to be able to afford the Netflix subscription? And when she scrolls on TikTok shop and wants to be able to be like everybody else who’s living these cool lives, doing these glamorous influencer events or whatever she’s into, whatever is so captivating to her that’s making her watch this instead of go out and do those things, apply the makeup. How many makeup tutorials do women watch without ever even applying the makeup or using the tools and the products just because they’re distracted?

Status, Survival, and Social Media

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m wondering if this is a consequence of the Internet, this perspective. In my head, I was skipping back through 50 years and then 100 years, and I was going back further. I was like, what’s the human sort of wiring? A thousand years ago, when wealth didn’t exist, wealth was what you could carry. There was no such thing as bank accounts or money. So I was as wealthy as what I could carry.

And actually, maybe as I think Naval said this before, that the only currency back then which still persists, and actually wealth is just a proxy of, is status. Status has always meant survival. It means that I get the resources, I get the mates, but wealth isn’t this construct that actually the mind understands. But in the last 20, 30 years, because of social media, we’ve all been sort of wired in a way to believe that material possessions like the yacht or the follower account is of utmost importance. Maybe it’s just a proxy of, like, I belong and I’m not at risk. Maybe it’s a proxy of status.

NATALIE DAWSON: I think it’s a proxy of survival.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, exactly. So I’m wondering if we’d just been wired for the last 20 years to believe that we need these things because of the environment that we’re in, but actually, prehistorically, it doesn’t make sense that we would care about. So pursuit, I think, is really hardwired into us, or it’s like, we wouldn’t have these cameras in this house and stuff. So clearly my ancestors were wired to pursue things and to build, but they were also most certainly wired to depend.

I think this might be one of the real problems with society at the moment is that we’re all pursuing independence. I think this is a bit of a problem. I think about this quite a lot, actually. Like the decline in faith and the decline in community institutions and the decline in people having kids and family. I’m like, we’re really becoming really individualistic, and I’m not sure that’s within our nature.

Survival as a Collective Mechanism

NATALIE DAWSON: See, I think survival has to depend upon other people. It’s not just my survival. Once I’ve handled my survival, the amount of money that I make, it instantly goes to the problems that come with other people’s survival, whether that’s a family member, a group of friends, and how far out that expands.

I don’t think that changed 200 years ago or 2,000 years ago. The ability to accumulate things to better prepare yourself in a harvest, better prepare yourself in a time of a drought, to actually sustain and make it through to really survive. And the more contacts that you have, the more you are setting yourself up to survive, the more people who know you, even though it’s a little bit of a status symbol, it’s actually a survival mechanism for you.

Because millions of people across the globe, at any point in time that you have a problem, you’ve built enough trust and credibility with them for them to be interested in helping you. So it’s actually a survival point. Now, of course, you can run the spectrum of the survival and say, well, is the additional millionth follower, the additional 2 million followers, actually leading to more survival? I would argue that potentially.

But what else could you be able to impact? If you were thinking about the survival of you, of your family, of the people that depend on you, your team that’s here, you are creating abundance so that other people can survive through what you have created and you pursuing your own survival and then having the second order be the group around you, family, the employees, the other groups that you are a part of that you contribute to in whatever ways you do. And then those concepts go further out to what can you actually be responsible for, for its survival?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s interesting is this approach to sort of one’s survival and one’s prosperity is resulting in us having, going through a genetic extinction because people are not having kids anymore. So Sarah, scrolling on Netflix with her four kids, is actually genetically surviving. And all these people that are focused on independence and how much money I can make, they’re genetically becoming extinct.

NATALIE DAWSON: It’s fascinating.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m basically playing devil’s advocate with myself because if you observe my life clearly, this is a massive contradiction. But it’s something that’s been front of mind for me at the moment is this idea of dependence and independence. And obviously I’m approaching the season of life where I’m going to have kids and there’s going to be trade offs that I have to make, that I do make. But I guess we shall see what happens.

Earning Respect Over Being Liked

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think people respect you a lot more now at 33 than they did when you were in 2019?

NATALIE DAWSON: Of course they do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what should someone do that is looking to earn the respect? Someone that feels like they’re continually disrespected? There’s something about them, there’s something in the way they carry themselves that they continually feel like people are disrespecting them. They might work in a business or, you know, they might be low down in a company or maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re just someone who’s gone through the corporate world and they’re continually disrespected. What would you say they should do to earn people’s respect?

NATALIE DAWSON: The first thing somebody has to do in order to earn respect is to decide that they would rather be respected than liked. That trade off is made. Too often we’re in a situation when the right respectful thing to do is unlikable. We don’t choose the right respectable thing to do. We prioritize being liked.

And so when you make that decision to be respected and to not prioritize what everybody thinks about you, you can then transition into the second step, which is you have to get stats in the area that you want respect in. If you’re low in an organization or you have different people around you who don’t respect you for a variety of different reasons, what is the area of your expertise that is undeniable? It’s proof, it exists in the physical universe.

It’s not just because you had an idea or you think you can be an entrepreneur or you’d like to be someone who gives people relationship advice. I’m sorry, but if you’re not in a relationship and you don’t have a stat of being able to have a good relationship and you can’t have a spouse that’s like, “Wow, this person’s great. I love being around this person,” you probably shouldn’t be giving that advice. And that’s why you don’t have respect in that area.

So I don’t think respect is an overall life respect. You need to have respect in the different compartments. It’s not just Steven is a respectable person altogether. That’s a facade to me. You might not be respectable in certain areas. I maybe shouldn’t respect you in certain areas of your life, but other areas, I would think areas that you’ve prioritized, you are incredibly respectable in. And you’ve prioritized getting stats and proof in those areas to earn people’s respect whether they like you or not, because you have something to prove for it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Has that been a journey for you, this idea of caring less about being liked? Because you talked about that earlier as being really central to your sort of early twenties, et cetera.

NATALIE DAWSON: It was so hard for me to not want to be liked. I had a mom growing up who was a medical doctor and just was the world’s most sweet, kind, thoughtful person. She would sit down at a party and every single person in that room loved her immediately. She just had this aura about her. And so I watched my mom growing up as a role model and somebody who still to me today is a role model.

And she really emphasized how important it is to ask great questions and to be engaged with other people. And what I lost in that process is, well, if I’m always asking other people and trying to get other people to like me and it’s always that flow, what do I actually think about myself? Because I’m so focused on over accommodating others.

And so if you’re trying to flip this for yourself, you’re trying to go from I over index on being liked and not so over index on being respectable and liking what I think about myself, you really have to go out to your three year version of yourself and your five year version of yourself because no one is going to get clear on that for you besides you.

And once you put that stake in the ground saying this is what I want to be known for, this is who I want to become, this is who I imagine myself being. This isn’t a manifestation practice, it’s I’m going to decide who that person is and then I’m going to like myself at 20, at 30, at 70, because I’m acting in accordance with the way that I view myself in the future and I’m going to become the person that I want to be.

Setting Boundaries and Protecting Values

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you found that you’ve had to reinforce and protect your boundaries in order to earn that respect? Do you find that people try and test you?

NATALIE DAWSON: Of course they do. I work with hundreds of team members every single day who have their own points of view and their own perspectives on what they want the work to look like, what they want our culture to look like. And I think I’ve had to wrestle with this so much because I want to create an environment where people can be successful.

My definition of leadership is making other people’s success easy. So if I’m going to be a leader, I’m going to make other people’s success easy. How would I go about doing that? What type of environment would they need to be in in order to actually make their success easy compared to their alternative, which is going down the street and trusting that some other leader is going to make them more successful?

And so I really wrestle with who I need to be and what the boundaries are that I set for myself. And one of the things I’ve gotten so much criticism of online was when I publicly shared a TikTok about firing somebody because I found out that she was cheating on her significant other and the other person also had a significant other. And as soon as I found out about it, I terminated both of them immediately. And it’s so shocking to people that…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Wait, someone was cheating with someone in the company?

NATALIE DAWSON: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And they both had partners outside of the company.

NATALIE DAWSON: Both had partners outside of the company. As soon as I caught wind of it, it wasn’t even like a split second decision. Well, I guess it technically was split second decision. It was like, I can’t have this in my environment, especially somebody close around me.

People trust me and should trust any leader to help them make their success easy. Am I making people’s success easy by putting inside that environment people who are going to erode the values of the group? No. Success for most people isn’t getting a divorce from their significant other. Success for most people looks like figuring out how to have the success in their professional lives and in their financial lives while also being able to have a spouse.

I wouldn’t want my husband going out to work and being in an environment where the company was just fine with people cheating on each other, lying to each other and not having a code of ethics, doing drugs. None of that is something that I want inside my environment because it’s my job to make people’s success easy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: One would say that’s none of your business what they’re doing when they go home.

NATALIE DAWSON: That is my business, first of all, because it was with each other.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, but they’re not doing it at work.

NATALIE DAWSON: Well, there was a, not to get into specifics of the particular event, but happened to be around work related.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if it wasn’t at work, you still—

NATALIE DAWSON: Even if it was, I would fire the person immediately.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’d fire someone for cheating? Absolutely. On their partner?

NATALIE DAWSON: Absolutely. I can’t have cheaters. If they’re going to cheat on the person they’re supposed to spend the rest of their life with, do you think that they’re cheating on their work? Do you think that they’re going to cheat on our clients?

Do you think that they’re going to have the ethics and morals and judgment to not be so distracted with their own personal ethics situation that they can actually focus and do a good job? That person in any environment is a liability to the environment. It’s a complete liability.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Some people have, you know, things in their personal life which are very different to the way that they show up professionally though. People do all kinds of things in their personal life.

It’s terrifying because, listen, the way that I see it is if I expand the scope of my concerns, I’m going to get f*ing nothing done. So if I start, you know, going in time who they’re at home with and in bed with and what’s going on in their personal life, unless they bring it to me—obviously when you’re the founder or the CEO, people bring you stuff and they say, look, this is going to impact my work, but, you know, boundary.

I don’t want to be the government of your f*ing personal situations as well, as long as it doesn’t show up in the office.

Starting a Business in 2025

STEVEN BARTLETT: If I’m thinking of starting a business in 2025, you know, you’ve spoken to thousands and thousands and thousands of business owners online, probably many millions of business owners. When we think about that initial period of coming up with the idea and picking what to work on, is there any advice you’d give people based on the success and failure you’ve seen, about what they should aim at, what they should work on, especially in the context of 2025, when so much in the world is changing so quickly?

NATALIE DAWSON: If they could use the frame—if any business owner or potential business owner could think about starting a business from the standpoint of “where is there the greatest chance for me to be successful?”—that is the best frame to use.

Unfortunately, most do not use that frame and they base it off of their existing experience and the skills that they have. If it was not based off of existing experience or skills that somebody has, I think AI is going to be the great leveler, because nobody has a lot of experience in AI.

Nobody knows in small businesses across America how to hook up automations and start working with assistants to be able to put small businesses onto a CRM system or an operating system that connects to their financial software that allows the business owner to make great decisions. No one has done this at scale because it didn’t exist.

And so if I was starting a business in 2025, I would absolutely look at how do I help business owners who have an infinite budget for things that actually work to make them more money, solve problems that are real to them.

And the problems that are real to the 35 million business owners in the United States of America is that they don’t know how to use AI. They are terrified of AI and they’re going to either put their head in the sand or assume that somebody who is young is going to create the solution for them.

When somebody instead who is experienced could have an eight, maybe even a nine figure business over the course of the next 18 to 24 months, really figuring out how to help solve these problems, because it makes the business owner to that business incredibly sticky. The customer is always going to be there and they would be on the front end of something that nobody has experience in.

Market Growth and Opportunity

STEVEN BARTLETT: So do you think a lot about the speed in which that market is growing when you think about where to set up shop and start a business?

NATALIE DAWSON: Of course the market growth is everything. Because if you want to start a paper business in 2025, you would have to be the best paper business and really have a unique positioning to make that successful when you could do something less well and be much more successful because there’s just more opportunity in the growth and there’s less players in markets.

So the growth allows for innovation, the growth allows for new entrants. And as I mentioned, with AI, there’s just an unprecedented opportunity in front of people right now.

But I’m also very excited about service based businesses. Roofers, plumbers, electricians, HVAC, all of those businesses. The core of the business doesn’t get disrupted by AI until robots, but those business operations are ripe for somebody to come in.

I don’t care if you’re 15 years old or if you’re 50 years old and get paid tens of thousands of dollars per client to implement very simple solutions that really do solve problems for those businesses using AI.

The Most Profitable Business Sectors

STEVEN BARTLETT: I heard you talk about when you described the six most profitable businesses that you think will be around in 2026. We’ve talked about AI businesses, talked about home services. The other one was hybrid wellness clubs. Why is health such a big prediction for you in terms of profitability and a good place to set up shop?

NATALIE DAWSON: There’s growth in the health space. After COVID, the whole world changed and their priorities changed as it relates to health. The statistics I read recently about alcohol sales connected to nightclubs, it’s just not what it used to be because instead of wanting to go out late and party and do all sorts of things, people are actually prioritizing their health.

And providing them with solutions for optimizing their health is just—it’s continued to grow ever since COVID and it’s going to continue to grow with different types of amenities at gyms, with different types of technology that people are inserting into what a traditional—

I one time recently went to a facial, my favorite thing, my hobby. I went to get a 60 minute facial and they integrated IV services into that facial experience. Well, what else could you do that allows somebody who is sitting in a chair for 60 minutes to add revenue to that business that’s connected to their health and well being? Those types of innovations are happening in small markets all across the world.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And why did you say in that video pet care?

NATALIE DAWSON: People love their pets and people will spend money on their pets. People will spend more money on their pets than they’ll spend on their kids and then they’ll spend on themselves. I mean, if somebody has a dog—I recently talked to somebody who told me that she was doing reiki with her 12 dogs.

I mean, it’s just the level of interest that people have in taking care of their pets. I think what’s happened in that marketplace specifically is as business owners and high income earners make more money and they do have these pets, these things that are dependent upon them that aren’t yet children, they want to spend their discretionary income on making that pooch that is their new best friend Fido comfortable, making him be well through all sorts of offerings.

Because I feel bad and it can actually pay off my guilt by providing Fido with a caretaker and nail polish and EMF therapies.

Breaking Through the Million Dollar Bottleneck

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the other thing that I think is particularly pertinent to the experience you’ve had is so many small business owners will come up to me and say that they are—they won’t say it like this, but what they’re describing is that they’re a bottleneck in their own business.

There are maybe, I don’t know, a million in revenue. I mean most people that come up to me say this exact same thing. They’ve reached about a million in revenue in total. And they don’t know how to scale beyond their typically service based businesses where someone’s doing a service for a client. And what would you, what do you say to those people when you’ve encountered them in your company?

NATALIE DAWSON: Welcome to being an entrepreneur. This is not a unique set of challenges. This is an expected set of challenges. The statistics show that the challenges that business owners face at that break point of taking what they are doing that is working and transitioning that to having other people help them is part of the process.

And so there is nothing wrong with this business owner. It’s just that they don’t technically know how to train somebody to do what they do well. That then allows the business owner to focus on the business owner’s primary role. And that primary role should be to generate revenue.

It shouldn’t be the dentist being in the person’s mouth. You cannot have 12 dental clinics and still be the person that is helping the person floss and making sure that they are flossing right. Mostly hygienists help dentists with that. But you have to get out of the doing of your business and you have to get into the scaling of the operations of your business. And those are just skills that you don’t currently have.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what is that skill? What is the core skill there?

NATALIE DAWSON: It’s a tactical skill. And the skill is opening up their calendar, looking at what they do every single day, duplicating through process creation what it is that they do that makes them a special snowflake in their mind.

Because every business owner thinks that they are the only person that can talk to their customer. They’re the only person that their clients will listen to. Nobody is ever going to be able to service their patient like them. That’s what they think. And so they create those conditions.

Instead of saying no, I’m going to objectively look at where I spend my time. And out of all of the things that I do across a 50 hour work week, there are specific things that are not the highest value for me to continue to do. But I would have to train somebody how to do that thing flawlessly.

It is not about hiring somebody who’s going to know how to do that thing. That’s where they fail. And then they lose confidence because they think some magical unicorn employee is just going to come into their lives and take this thing that only they know how to do and actually be able to do it. Of course they can’t.

So it’s this reinforcing thought that they have instead of structuring it to say out of these things, these are the specific parts of the business that I want to remove off of my plate so that in three months from now, I do not touch these processes.

In order to do that, I’m going to document what I do, ideally using a framework like vision, commitment, execution, so that it doesn’t just get reduced down to steps, but so that team members can understand the why behind it, what the organization is committed to, what the team member needs to commit back to and then actually execute on whatever that process is.

And instead of just handing that person those items in an onboarding and maybe never checking it again, you’re going to go through a four step process. First, you’re going to tell the person what they’re supposed to do, AKA the process. Ideally.

Then you show them what they’re supposed to do so that they can see how this applies in real life. It’s not just something on a document. Then you’re going to let them do that thing and you are going to coach them and provide them feedback on doing that thing.

So when you can see that you’ve properly trained somebody and you switched your mindset from just assuming that adults learn the same way that we used to learn when we were children, which is just by picking it up and figuring it out, you’re going to give them a full structure.

Tell me, show me, let me, coach me on the most important things that they need to be onboarded with. And then you are going to actually measure that they are able to do those things in the way that you are able to do that so that that role inside your business is handled. And then you just do that over and over and over again.

The Cost of Failed Delegation

STEVEN BARTLETT: So often when people are having this conversation with me about this, they say, “Oh, I tried that and I brought someone in and they fed up.” And so yeah, I’m not just going to do it myself. That’s the rebuttal that I always get. It’s always people saying, “Well, I tried that, I trusted someone, they fed me over. So that doesn’t work.”

NATALIE DAWSON: What responsibility can they take in the interview process? What responsibility can they take in the onboarding process? Did they actually show that person what they’re supposed to do? Did they ensure that the person knew what to do?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think most people are bad at hiring?

NATALIE DAWSON: Of course they are. People are terrible at hiring.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Where do they go wrong? What are the biases that end up consuming that process that make them make a bad decision?

NATALIE DAWSON: I don’t think they really understand what the work is that they’re trying to get that person to do. So they Google a job description. They use ChatGPT or use Grok to put a job description that isn’t actually connected to the real outcomes in the role.

I can imagine if you posted for a marketing position inside your business, for you, marketing looks like lots of different things. For the average business owner, “I’m just going to, I need somebody to help me with marketing.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: They don’t even know what they’re hiring for.

NATALIE DAWSON: Yeah, no. So then the person comes in with a certain set of experiences and they are going to drive based off of their experiences whatever they think the outcomes are for their role inside that business. Because the owner never took the responsibility to say, “This is how I’m going to objectively measure was this person successful based off of the fact that the marketing that we do for our plumbing business that’s doing $800,000 of revenue.”

Avoiding the Marketing Trap

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what if I don’t know the right type of marketing because I’m a plumber? I don’t know about f*ing marketing. So I’m going to be very easily duped by someone that tells me that they know marketing. What do I do to minimize the probability of me being duped?

NATALIE DAWSON: Well, the good news is if you are a plumber currently and you’re doing, let’s say $800,000 of revenue, you figured out marketing for $800,000 of revenue. So the first thing in order to not be duped would be ensuring that the person that you’re bringing on can at least do what you are doing and they can duplicate what you are doing.

Now, once they’ve demonstrated to you that they can take on those tasks for that $800,000, they are competent, they understand the business, they understand who your customer is because you forced them to, because you documented what you did to get the first $800,000 and maybe that’s even referrals. Great. What is your referral process?

And then once they’ve been able to master what you created a model for, I like to call this the 4M’s model: Mimic, Master, Multiply. A business owner can first create the model of what they are doing today that’s generating the $800,000 of revenue in their plumbing business. I take a model, I have the model. This is what we are doing for marketing inside our business.

Then I move into seeing if they can mimic what is the behavior to then move into mastering it. And once somebody is at mastering something inside a plumbing business for $800,000 a year that it’s generating, they can then start to tweak and add things. And maybe we’re going to also try one other thing. We’re going to try Instagram marketing because we know that our plumbing clients are on Instagram and we’re going to have this strategy here.

So now I’m going to be able to add to that. At which point when a team member can go through those first three M’s, model, mimic, master, then they’re in a position to multiply their role. Because if they really did master something, the results would show that to indicate that the business is ready for them to add potentially a marketing coordinator underneath the marketing manager that can then go through those first three steps of the process, while the team member who was once responsible for those things is no longer doing those things, but is being additive to additional types of marketing inside that business.

Hiring People Smarter Than You

STEVEN BARTLETT: The other thing that I often wonder is if people aim too low with talent, especially earlier stage founders. There tends to be a bit of insecurity there and they don’t want someone to come in and tell them what to do in a particular domain.

Because I think the further I’ve got in my career, the more I’ve sought out people that are significantly smarter than me. And I see that as the game. But in the early innings of my career, I think I was hiring people I could manage.

NATALIE DAWSON: Do you think you weren’t as successful when you were hiring people you could manage?

STEVEN BARTLETT: 100%, because now you’re able to bring on talent to help you bring on whole new lines of revenue, whole new partnerships, business opportunities, manage those things.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. In the early innings of my career, I was particularly aiming at young people that were my age or younger because I was what, 20? So how the hell am I going to bring in a 45 year old that’s been doing this for 25 years and get in and be able to tell them anything?

Which was the fault in my thinking because I thought my job was to tell them what to do and to give them the vision. But actually, as I got more secure in myself, I realized that the game is the inverse, which is trying to find truly exceptional people that know things I don’t know and create the conditions where their knowledge adds to the hive mind of the decisions of this organization. And actually that’s what we need. We need new thinking, new experiences.

The Risk of Bringing in Experts Too Early

NATALIE DAWSON: I think that’s important once you reach $30 million of revenue. But until you as the founder can generate something that you can prove works and you can replicate what works, you open yourself up to significant risk.

And the stats show it, the majority of businesses, 97% of businesses, fail within 10 years. So by trusting or thinking that you’re going to bring on somebody who’s smarter than you, you’re not actually taking on your role to say, “This is what I want to build, this is what I’ve built so far. Before you will be additive to this environment, I need to make sure that what we have built so far, the $800,000 of revenue, the $2 million of revenue, the $10 million of revenue, I need to first make sure that you can do that.”

Because if you can’t do that and we can’t duplicate what we’re already doing that works well, we don’t know what is the right idea to bring in because there isn’t a core understanding of what makes this business run today.

And the last thing that you want to do is bring on a leader. Let’s say your business is doing $10 million of revenue and you think that there’s somebody out there that is smarter than you who’s going to entirely change your sales process. Maybe you weren’t the best salesperson. You hired a salesperson very early, they’ve tapped out in their ability to add additional salespeople and really properly run a sales team.

Well, as soon as that’s happened and you’re going to bring on this external person, it would be great if they could add $20 million of revenue. But if it’s through some different product and different service and different ways that disrupts what got you to $10 million, you’re not at $10 million any longer, you’re at $8 million or $7 million.

And there’s real slipbacks that happen. And to me that’s more of the reality that I see, which is the slip back because the business owner doesn’t know enough about the core parts of the business to decide how the business is run, what the core offer is, to have the confidence to then bring on people who are additive that can’t break the business.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you think you should approach with caution because there’s risk associated with onboarding people that might be expensive and know too much. I guess it goes back to being duped, being able to dupe you by you not fully understanding what they’re saying and what they know.

NATALIE DAWSON: And they can’t dupe you if you know what you are already doing. If you’re really willing to model what is currently being done and they are willing to be humble enough to come into your environment and learn the reasons why. This doesn’t have to take years, this can take a handful of months.

I’m not talking about stifling innovation for quarters and quarters or years and years to make sure that they really are indoctrinated with the way that the organization works. Absolutely not. That wouldn’t work.

The way you have to do it is quickly assessing that they understand the way that things work inside your current business. We just recently brought on a new C suite. Within the first handful of weeks, I can tell that he’s picking up on what our core business does. And if I didn’t think that, it would be hard for me to trust some of his recommendations because I brought on a C suite team member earlier this year who had all of these fanciful ideas and the big names and you think that they’re going to bring on all these things, but they can’t actually contextualize what their experience is to the core business because they don’t understand the core business.

And then it ends up disenfranchising the team members that they’re responsible for working with. And I have seen more often than not that trusting too early on without that founder getting the necessary skills ends up in the luck scenario instead of, “This was a strategy because I knew and had certainty about what was going on and I’m good with what my four walls are. This is what you are going to bring that is incredibly additive to that core business.”

But that rigor and that discipline has to be there from the founder first.

Learning to Assess Talent

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s interesting. Yeah, it is really interesting. I think part of my bias is because I’ve been there before, I would never start a new business now without aiming extremely high with the talent. But that’s actually because I’m harder to dupe now.

So if you have to pay someone a huge salary, for example, and give them a huge package, whatever, I’m better able to assess whether they are worth it and what their ROI is going to be versus the start of my career where hiring someone and taking such a big risk on someone, I didn’t have enough data to understand if I was being duped or not.

So it was a lot of faith and trust and, “Well, they worked at this incredible company so they must be good.” And I’ve also seen that completely backfire as well.

The 10 Steps to Becoming a Millionaire

You talk about these 10 steps to becoming a millionaire in a video that you made in December 2024 and there are a couple of things that I wanted to pull out here. So you outline this 10 step process to becoming a millionaire within a year and one of them is researching what jobs millionaires have. Then rate your interest and skills in each and pick one to master.

The other one is cut out friends who drain energy or don’t support your goals. Study the 10 most successful people in your field through podcasts, videos and books. Use every moment to build skills. Follow only millionaires on social media and eliminate all distractions such as Netflix and doom scrolling.

Be willing to invest and go into debt as without investment knowledge you will stay broke. Attend events with successful people. Research who’ll be attending. Master selling yourself, your customers and your team members daily.

On this point of selling, is there anything on this subject of how to be a great salesperson that we haven’t talked about that you think is important? Whether it’s selling yourself or selling your ideas or selling your business?

NATALIE DAWSON: One of my favorite quotes from Grant Cardone, “To the extent you are sold, you will sell.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay. So to the extent in which you believe something is the extent you’ll be able to make others believe in the thing.

The Foundation of Sales Success

NATALIE DAWSON: So if you’re not sold on yourself, on your business idea, on the product that you’re selling for the company that you work for, on getting another department to work cross-functionally with you, if you aren’t really sold on that, you will not sell. But I think it goes a layer deeper than that oftentimes because it’s easy to look at, “I’m not selling the product inside my business.”

Maybe I’m a team member. I’m in sales, and I’m not hitting my quota this month of cars that I’m supposed to sell. And I’m like, “Well, I don’t really feel good about the fact that I sell cars. This car is a piece of crap. Of course I’m not selling the car.” And you can get very critical of the thing and rationalize why you are not good at sales.

But if you really do take a step back, why did you choose to sell cars in the first place? Why is that the thing that you said, “I’m going to spend my time and energy being sold on?” You could have chosen lots of other opportunities, and you actually being sold on the PR firm that you wanted to work at, instead of taking the sales job that you got and not confronting the PR rejection that you got, landed you in this place where you’re unsold.

And then you’re critical of your environment and you’re critical of the product, and then you think you’re not good at sales, when really you just needed to go back to that thing that you were actually sold on because you sold yourself on why you thought for you that was your opportunity. Then you just missed the target.

And instead of being unreasonable about the target, you became reasonable and started selling something you didn’t believe in. And then you think that you’re not good at sales. And so the reasonableness in yourself, in what you want to be doing, is actually why I find that salespeople can’t sell. It’s not about their inherent skills.

Selling Roofs: A Case Study

If I can get them sold on the product, of course I’m going to get them sold on the product. I help business owners across the country get sold on getting their team members to sell roofs. I believe that somebody knocking on the door and selling roofs is the most important thing for that team member. I am sold on the fact that they’re working for a roofer who cares about them.

So I’m like, “Hell, yeah, let’s get on the roof.” I was on a roof about a month ago and then was on another roof two months ago because I literally helped these business owners train their sales team members to sell roofs. And these sales team members aren’t naturally interested in roofs. They didn’t wake up one day thinking, “My life’s dream is to sell a roof.”

But what are they sold on? They’re sold on the opportunity to potentially join this roofing company to go from one location to two locations, three locations, five locations. Because the business owner has created that vision for them. And the salesperson can sell themselves on the skills that they have to understand how to sell a roof.

Maybe not the sexiest thing, but that’s a stepping stone in order to be a future expansion partner with this business owner, because this opportunity exists.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how do I sell a roof if I’m on that roof with you and you’re trying to train me to sell the roof better? What are you saying to me?

NATALIE DAWSON: Well, ideally, you’re knocking on the door of the homeowner.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, I knock on the door.

NATALIE DAWSON: You knock on the door. And you go through, if there was a storm, there’s all sorts of ways that you can sell roofs. But let’s say that there was a storm nearby or recently that hit that area. And you could go the easier route, which is going through insurance, because that roof is completely then paid for.

But then you’d need to go up on the roof and or use a drone to look at the real damage, because that in and of itself is a sales skill. Somebody going up and pointing out the problem that that person has that they do not know in that moment that they have helps the person feel confident in selling that roof.

So it’s just as much a part of a process to go walk the roof or to fly a drone over that roof to see the damage as it is a selling mechanism for the salesperson. Because you’re not just selling somebody a roof that doesn’t need a roof. They actually have a problem.

And then you would educate that sales individual on the damage that that can do long term, the value loss of that property. And if you can sell the salesperson on why that homeowner deserves to know that their roof has something that insurance could pay for that could get fixed for them within a handful of weeks, that doesn’t erode their biggest investment that that person has likely made in their life, their home.

All of a sudden I have an army of salespeople who are interested in selling roofs because they’re sold not just on the fact that it’s a roof, but the impact that that work makes on the person that they’re selling, and ideally the opportunity that they have inside that company to be great at selling roofs.

The Sales Framework: Problem, Cost, Solution

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you pointed out the problem that they have. You then assigned a cost to that problem, how much it’s going to cost them over the long term or short term. And then you pose the solution, which is to get the roof repaired. And I guess you’re trying to frame the solution relative to the cost so that the solution is not bigger or more costly than the cost of having a bad roof.

Earlier on, you mentioned this phrase, which I’ve not heard before. It was just before we started recording. You talked about a women’s wealth transfer. And when I asked you what was front of mind for you at the moment, you referenced that you were thinking a lot about the women’s wealth transfer. What is this?

The Women’s Wealth Transfer

NATALIE DAWSON: The women’s wealth transfer between 2025 and 2030 looks like, these are US stats, $10 trillion are in the hands of women right now. And between now and 2030, that number is going to go up to $30 trillion. So this wealth is going to balloon.

And when you think about the implications of how this wealth transfer happens, it’s not just cash that is given to women all of a sudden because they’re making more money. There is a transition because of differences in life expectancy in partners, a man and a woman. There’s about a…

STEVEN BARTLETT: On average, men are going to die first.

NATALIE DAWSON: Yep. And it’s about five and a half, six years. So women are left with assets, not cash, like homes, businesses, portfolios, investments, bank accounts that oftentimes they were left out of the conversation with the financial advisor. And they don’t actually know how to operationalize, how to manage.

Because up until as recent as 50 years ago, women weren’t even allowed to open bank accounts without their husband or their father until that passed in the 80s. And so the wealth is actually moving towards women. But women today feel less financially able due to content creation.

There was a recent study done by a company called Elvest where they analyzed the amount of manifestation content on the Internet created by women creators. There’s 12 times as much manifestation content from women creators as there is investing and equity content. Or 70% of women feel more overwhelmed with financial information after consuming the content because it’s a tip or trick or hack that is being shared instead of a real system and process.

How do they take something and systematize or operationalize this business that has equity, but then there’s trucks, maybe that they’re inheriting, then there’s debt on this business and it’s just a brand new conversation.

Financial Literacy and Empowerment

And as women get more financially literate, as they get more financial opportunities, there have to be more ways for them to be in these conversations. There have to be more ways for them to understand how to navigate what opportunities didn’t exist structurally, even up until as recent as 20, 30 years ago.

And so I’m passionate about this, because I see this incredible time where I help people every day understand how to grow businesses and be competent in businesses. So as the total wealth transfer takes place over the next 20 years, from baby boomers to the next generation, that total wealth transfer is about $124 trillion.

How do I equip women to feel confident with the decisions that they’re making to not just fire their financial advisor, which 70% of them do after their spouse dies within the first year, and actually know before this catastrophic event takes place, how they control the money, how they feel confident with the money so that once they have it, it is not in moments of panic and stress and frustration that they are having to figure these things out.

They already feel like they are equipped with conversations about what is a P&L and how do I understand what’s happening with my 401k. And still some of these concepts are just out of sight, out of mind and traditionally held by male roles in a household.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what would you recommend people do who find themselves in that situation where they are financially illiterate? You used the word earlier on financial crisis. Is that dovetailing into the same thing? Is that because people, is that the financial illiteracy point when you say financial crisis?

The Financial Crisis

NATALIE DAWSON: For me, the financial crisis is how few people are actually making enough money to make ends meet. The financial crisis is that there are so many businesses, 35 million in the US alone, and yet less than 200,000 make more than a million dollars.

And if less than 200,000 make over a million dollars and the average margin of a business is 8.5%, you’re circling the drain as to how much money people are actually making. It seems like there’s so much money because of social media, and there are team members who work in organizations that make more than $60,000 a year.

But people are actually making less money than I think society believes because of the proliferation of content creation. And so this crisis to me has much more to do with how do we get people skills that they need with our life expectancy in total looking like it’s going to be longer based off of the different treatments that are coming out due to AI in healthcare, in genomics.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think is the most important financial information the average person needs in this regard?

Money Matters: Skills Over Savings

NATALIE DAWSON: I think the most important financial information is actually that money matters. And if money matters, how are you spending your time today, tomorrow, the next day to get skills and to do things that generate money. And if you can align your time with making more money, instead of thinking that it’s some fixed resource or there is some scarcity around it, you could actually increase the top line because you can save your way to the bottom, but you get to the bottom, there’s no abundance in the bottom.

So what are the skills? If I was somebody that was trying to earn more money today, I would go onto one of the AI platforms and say, “This is the set of skills that I have. These are the set of interests that I have. This is the current job that I hold, what I do for work. And my goal is to increase my income between now and 12 months from now by $100,000.”

“What are the specific skills and the associated syllabus for each week? If I carved out two hours a day for me to learn that you could put together for me so that I can actually get skills that would demonstrate that I’m able to make more money.”

And I think that message is missed when people talk about investing and 401ks. Sure you can make your 6%, your 8%, your 10%, but what can you actually control? And what does every individual have the ability to control? Their skills and how they exchange those skills for problems that they are solving in exchange, earning more income. And then they’re able to invest and do all of those other things.

But those things are ancillary. They are not the main thing. The main thing is you need to get skills. You are going to live longer, wake up, smell the roses. The world is going to be a very long place that you are going to inhabit for the next potentially hundred years on average.

So let’s get comfortable with learning more, understanding what our stops are to learning so that we aren’t scared as the world changes of having to acquire new skills.

The Reality of Passive Income

STEVEN BARTLETT: People love talking about passive income, especially on YouTube and the Internet. Everyone wants passive income. The idea that you can make income and do f* all is unbelievably compelling.

NATALIE DAWSON: Sign me up.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I would like some passive income. What is the reality of this? Because there’s a real obsession with figuring out ways to make passive income. I want to earn money when I sleep. What is the reality of that? Is that a thing? Is that possible? Is that something I should be aiming at?

NATALIE DAWSON: You should aim at that once you have a million dollars in your bank account. Before you have a million dollars, don’t even think about passive income. You have no asset to actually earn passive income off of. And your time is much better spent learning how do you get your first million dollars than it is through passive income and thinking how you’re going to earn a percentage on the principal that you’ve invested.

If you make $60,000 a year, medium wage, United States of America, you make $60,000 a year. 8% on that isn’t going to get you to financial freedom. So don’t figure out how to crack 8% to maybe I’m going to get 15% return, because the principal is still so small. The $60,000 is so small.

What do you have to do? Actually learn how do I make my income $160,000. But what’s wild, once people learn how to do this, and the skill of learning is like, it’s the greatest drug on planet Earth because you learn how to do something and you become competent in it. And as soon as you get there, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, if that’s all it took for these people that I used to think were special to earn an additional hundred thousand, and now all I have to do is do that same process again to go from where I’m at to be able to earn 1.6 million, do a 10x, sign me up.”

Because you get this confidence from learning how to do things. And so passive income is great at a certain stage of life and at a certain stage of financial protection, but it is not, it is financial protection. It is not for the people who are saying, “I want to go build something, I want to grow something, I want to create something.”

It is to me, almost the opposite of survival, actually. It’s your backup plan. It’s your rainy day fund in case shit hits the fan. And I’m not opposed to having a backup plan. It’s good to have a backup plan, but 99% of your time should be focused on how do I make the first plan go fricking right and do everything I can today to control plan A.

The Edge in an AI-Driven World

STEVEN BARTLETT: You talked about acquiring skills being the key thing there. Obviously, the world is changing quickly because of AI and all the skills that a lot of people once acquired in university. You know, accountants, lawyers, podcasters. I guess our skills are quickly being replaced by intelligent machines and systems that can now do what we do.

And when you look around the corner at what’s going on in robotics, I think Neo, the robotics company this week, put on sale their first humanoid robot, which can move through the physical environment and do things. And when I combine these two things, I can combine intelligence with the ability to manipulate the physical environment. I go, where are humans going to be in all this?

Because it is conceivable, it’s perfectly conceivable to me that much of what we employ people to do these days will be redundant in the near future. And that’s not to say that there won’t be new jobs, but it’s a difficult time to be investing heavily in any particular skill set. Well, some skill sets, because they’re becoming invalid in no time at all, even as a writer.

So I’ve written two books and I enjoy the process of writing. I consider it to be one of my edges. I was like, I’m quite good at writing, so that’s useful. You can build a personal brand, you can send good emails, you can convince people, investors, whatever it might be. But even now I’m like, f* it, everyone’s got AI now. ChatGPT. So they can just produce AI slop and they can literally just say, write it like Steven or write it like Natalie.

So the edges are going. What is the edge of the future, in your view? What is the edge? What is the skill I should double down on that the robots and AI aren’t going to steal from me?

NATALIE DAWSON: I think the only skill that we can actually double down on in a world of AI is the skill of learning and adapting, because we cannot predict what the world is going to look like in 2040. We do not know what robots are, aren’t going to be capable of.

I’m not as bullish on this. I watched Elon have an interview over the weekend about his take on AI, and he said that it’s a supersonic tsunami, in which he proceeded to explain that supersonic is traveling at the speed of sound and a tsunami is a wall of water. And so if you think about that being AI, it’s coming, it’s here, it’s fast.

And of course, he benefits from everybody believing all of those things with all of the companies. And I am a pro Elon person. I love what he’s built, I love his mind. But I think that we’re further away than people think. But it is still coming.

And so the only hedge that somebody can have is the ability to adapt and learn. And what AI should be used for with every individual is the ability to learn. Acknowledge what you don’t know. That is the greatest strength somebody has. Really be comfortable saying, “I do not know how to read a P and L. I don’t know how to read this legal contract. I don’t know anything about AI and what I’ve heard an LLM, I don’t really know what it is or agentic. What’s the difference?”

And be able to convince yourself why that is the most important skill for you to push past that barrier of learning something new that is so uncomfortable because the names are new and you feel like a freaking idiot. And then you think everybody is smarter than you and that you’re just some fraud to push back on that and to have some resilience through it.

To say, “I’m going to adapt through this. I’m going to get to the other side and learn so that I concretely can have confidence that I can change in any environment based off of what’s needed of me in that environment. And I will add value to that environment regardless of whatever the external circumstances are.” That is the only choice. There is no alternative choice.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you scared about AI?

Embracing AI as a Learning Tool

NATALIE DAWSON: I’m not scared at all. I’m pumped, as you can tell. I’m really excited because I used to feel dumb. I used to feel like there were things that these smart, smart people knew that I didn’t know. And my entire outlook on life changed a handful of years ago when this got launched.

Because AI has taught me in two years what I would have had to go to school for and would have had to get a degree in, still to just find out that most people who went to school for those things and had degrees in them missed something critical and important.

And so for me, and I think people like me, and I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about who I categorize as people like me, it is an unprecedented time to lean into this reference of information that can specifically tutor you on what you don’t know to actually equip you.

We’ve never had this opportunity before and it’s not specific to you with your gender or your race or your age. It’s accessible. And so I’m beyond excited because anything that comes up that’s like, “Oh, this just changed the whole dynamic of the business.” Guess what? I have AI to help me understand that and to help me get whatever skill I need in this new world.

Same thing that people 100 years ago had to do. Same thing that 2000 years ago people had to do. They just didn’t actually have a tool to help them understand what was happening, to then learn what needed to happen from them, whatever they had misunderstood in order to actually get to the other side with real skills.

The Power of Believing You Can Learn Anything

STEVEN BARTLETT: Natalie, what do you think is the most important thing we haven’t talked about that we should have talked about as it relates to what you know about who my audience are and what they’re interested in?

NATALIE DAWSON: I think this is a connected subject. But I would want anybody in the audience, whether you make $60,000 a year, a million a year, 100 million a year, to actually have the belief in themselves that they can learn anything that they want to know and that there isn’t actually a barrier there that exists.

Because if I could get people to really believe that, their entire life would change due to the access that they have today, due to the tools that they have today. And so taking that confidence that I can walk into any room with any big shot, with anybody who knows something about a particular subject matter that I know nothing about, and feel totally comfortable being in that environment, because you can prep yourself, you can learn about it.

And life is so beautiful because you get those experiences and you don’t have to be scared of them. You can learn and you can understand, and there’s nothing that’s wrong with you to where you can’t. And there’s no special privilege or special characteristics that somebody has that you don’t have in that you can learn anything.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you used to think there were special characteristics or some kind of genetic genius gene that these people at the very top had? And how did that change once you were in rooms with those people?

The Power of Overcoming Self-Imposed Limitations

NATALIE DAWSON: Of course, I thought that there was some genius button that somebody clicked at birth before coming out of the womb where they just got to be special and they got to understand things. I really struggled growing up with remembering numbers. Numbers were so challenging. I would just reverse the numbers and then they wouldn’t stick in my brain. And I thought I was stupid for so much of my life.

And for anybody who also struggles with that, what you would come to find out being around lots of people, successful or unsuccessful people, is everybody has that thing. So the faster that you can attack it and get yourself comfortable with numbers, what I realized is that was just a story I told myself because had I ever spent an afternoon on a Sunday with my extra time actually trying to get better at remembering numbers? No, I hadn’t. I just used it as an excuse.

And successful people just limit the amount of excuses that they allow themselves to believe for why they aren’t successful. They take the limitation that they have and either they so over index in the strength and they ignore that, or they realize that that limitation is actually at a point where it is limiting them. So they have to attack it and take the time to get better and shore up that area to then be able to springboard from there.

The Gender Confidence Gap

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s also, I guess, another layer to this, which is men tend to rate their own performance higher than women do even when their actual performance is equal. And there’s a bunch of different studies that cite this. There’s one famous study that people always talk about which might not be, I think might be refuted now, but it said that men apply for a job when they meet 60% of the listed qualifications, while women only apply when they meet 100% of the listed qualifications.

Which in part as it relates to top jobs in Europe, people think that this is part of the reason why men are more likely to be in full time top jobs because that overconfidence means they’re more likely to apply and therefore more likely to, I guess, convince other people and more likely to get the job. So there is something, there seems to be a difference in genders in terms of the need to feel ready and the need to feel qualified.

NATALIE DAWSON: That’s so real to me. Yeah, that is so real to me. I get to work with people every day and I will have a personal, professional or financial goal conversation with team members who are in the exact same role. Let’s say they’re an account manager. One will be a female, one will be a male. The woman is a rock star. Clients love her and she’s so good and she just has this magical spark.

So I’ll be sitting with them with their personal, professional and financial goal conversation and the woman will say, “Oh, I’d like to go from making $80,000 a year to maybe in a year from now making $90,000.” And the next hour I’ll have a conversation with a guy who is not as performant as she is. And he will say, “Yeah, I’m making $80,000 a year. Think in the next three years I should be up to $200,000, $250,000.” I’ve had this happen over and over and over.

So I watch this in real time and my go to in that is to sit down with a girl and to say, “I want you to imagine what your life is going to look like in three years from now. So if you’re 35 years old, you’re going to be 38 years old. What does life look like? Who are you spending time with? How much money are you making? Have you traveled? Do you have a spouse? Do you have kids? What does life look like?”

And what I want you to do if you don’t have an account already is I want you to get hooked up with Pinterest. And you were going to create a board and you were just going to go through all of these incredible things that you could have in your life that you actually want. Not the stupid things, the things that you’re like, if my life could include that, it would change my life. I would love to have that life. For me, that would have been full sequin suit, because if you can’t do that, you’re of course going to be stunted in what you’re going to do in order to get there.

If it was a man who was struggling with that, though, I’d do the exact same thing. That, to me, is the real job of a leader is to inspire people enough, not about who you are and all of your accomplishments, but to actually have them see that they could have the life that they want through the work that they do every single day and tying those two things together and being ruthlessly honest with them when they do things that hold them back and remove things that are in their way.

The Closing Question

STEVEN BARTLETT: Natalie, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you is a fairly well known question. Actually it is, what would you do if you knew you would not fail?

NATALIE DAWSON: If I knew that I wasn’t going to fail, I would just fix world hunger and I’d fix all of these things. But short of thinking that I could solve those particular problems, it’s selfish to not have those goals and dreams. I just think for my actual life today, I really believe and preach and to my core, I feel act out that I take massive action towards goals that do seem unbelievable or unreal to me.

And right now, the set of goals that I have are the things that I’m very confident that I’m not going to fail at. And I’m spending time doing those things in order to get myself as close as possible to the woman that I want to become. And I could change my mind in a handful of months or a handful of years once I’ve achieved those things. But I guess I already actually do think that I’m living my life short of solving world hunger and world peace, that I’m doing everything that I know how to do to make an impact on the world.

Being Taken Seriously

STEVEN BARTLETT: I noticed that I’ve had a bunch of conversations on this show with people like Evie Pomporis, who is the Secret Service agent. And you have a lot of similarities to her, I think, because of the directness in which you speak. And I think part of the resonance is people want to know how to be taken seriously in this world.

And I think they look at you and see someone who is like them in many ways, or at least how they aspire to be, but is taken seriously in a world that is often hard to be taken seriously in, especially as a woman in male dominated environments, especially things like the finance industry and investment industry. It’s hard to be taken seriously. It’s hard to be respected.

And so people, I think people have a deep sense that they are being diminished. They are misunderstood, they’re not being heard. And so they, when they hear someone that speaks so clearly and with such conviction as you, they want to learn how to do it. Is there anything in that regard that we’ve left off?

Because I was on your YouTube channel and I was looking at some of your recent videos and one of the recent videos that has been incredibly resonant to people is this exact point, which is “The 1% Secrets to Make Anyone Respect You Instantly.” Is there anything within the subject of that video? And I was looking at the comments section, it was a lot of people talking about how they feel someone has disrespected them or that they feel they’ve been ignored or not heard. Is there anything you’d say to those people?

NATALIE DAWSON: Being looked down upon, being not taken seriously is actually your superpower. And you have to convert the energy of that frustration into what are you going to do in that environment next time to be taken seriously.

I went to a charity event, was about a decade ago now and I remember being mortified because I was in this career pivot where I was making the decision to work with Brandon and the…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Your husband?

NATALIE DAWSON: My husband, yeah. And the proverbial question of “Well, what do you do?” came around to me and I fumbled the question and for the rest of that night. And it was actually a charity trip, the person just didn’t take me seriously. And they were somebody that I wanted to respect me.

And I was so pissed off at myself that I messed up, that I hadn’t created something at 22 years old that was more impressive that they would take me seriously. And so I made it my mission between that point and the next year when we would go on that trip for them to take me seriously. And I had to look at what do I have to do, what do I have to create in order for somebody to take a 24 year old seriously?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What did you have to do and create?

Overcoming Communication Fear

NATALIE DAWSON: Well, I launched a podcast and I had to work on this communication skill because I was terrified to communicate. I used to not be able to communicate like this. I had a horrifying experience when I was in my early 20s where I was supposed to present this new leadership program that was being rolled out at this organization. And I was nervous ahead of time, but was fairly confident in the material that I was presenting.

And I walked up to the front of the room and I was the first person to speak. It was 8 o’clock in the morning and I got through five minutes of my hour long presentation. I turned around to the presentation screen to point out something and turned back to the audience. And in that moment, I was instantly petrified. The nerves took over every fiber of my body. I could not control what I was saying. My thoughts and my words did not connect.

And I proceeded to give the rest of my presentation that was supposed to take an additional 55 minutes in seven. And then I sat at the front of the room while everyone around me was talking about all the different components of the things I was supposed to be highlighting because I just couldn’t articulate them.

And from that point, for about four years, I was unable to have a conversation with people that had a larger group than four or five because this disconnect for me happened and this anxiousness took place and I had to work on this skill to learn how to communicate.

And so I launched a podcast. And the only topic that I felt comfortable talking about at that point, I didn’t have some business expertise. I wasn’t naive enough to think that somebody was going to listen to me at the wise age of 23 or 24, my early 20s, and how to run a business. So what did I know at that point and what was a problem that I was seeing?

Well, I was actually around a group of people who were in age gap relationships and having all these conversations in secret, but wouldn’t publicly talk about it. And so I started a podcast where I was talking about what it’s like being a third marriage and being a stepmom and how did we tell our parents and what are tools to navigate something that feels really crippling and almost embarrassing to somebody who is a high performer.

And I proceeded to have that podcast every single week. And I made it my mission that year to make a toast at every single meal that made sense for me to make a toast at so that I would worked out this skill of communicating.

And working out the skill of communicating is what allowed me to go from being in a room where I couldn’t trust myself to even introduce what I do to showing up the next year and having made progress on my communication and saying, “Hey, I know that you didn’t take me very seriously last year, but this year,” I would never say it like this, but “this year I’ve built this cool thing and I actually have this blog that has thousands of readers every single month that is generating this revenue.”

And you, Mr. Old man, might not have taken me seriously, but I could probably help you and your business do the same thing, because I know that you don’t know anything about this. So I gained a skill in that process and was able to talk about the skill that I knew was my angle.

Respect Versus Being Liked

STEVEN BARTLETT: The top comment on that video is “Being nice destroyed my life.”

NATALIE DAWSON: I can understand. Of course it did.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The second comment is “A friend to all is a friend to none.”

NATALIE DAWSON: People really resonate with the topic of being liked versus being respected. And people give up their goals in order to be liked and they give up what they believe that they can actually accomplish and thinking that it’s okay to go all in on themselves in order to be liked.

And so that message, I know, really resonated with people because I start out the video by talking about the difference between respect and being liked and really making that a choice. And it’s an active choice, not a passive thing that just happens.

The Power of Choosing Who You Want to Be Liked By

STEVEN BARTLETT: I wonder why that is. I wonder why so many people are really focused on the idea of being liked. They don’t want to be disliked and they want to be liked. But in their pursuit of being liked, they feel like they’re self-sabotaging in some way, like they’re disrespecting themselves.

So then they end up wanting to be okay with not being liked. What is the answer there in that vicious loop?

NATALIE DAWSON: You have to choose who you want to be liked by. And if you choose that you want to be liked by people who are respectable, you’re not going to lose.

If you choose that you want to be liked by your co-workers because they think it’s cool to shit on the company culture or to pretend like they’re working but not really care, then of course you’re going to get stuck in this vicious cycle because you actually want to be respected, but you’re choosing to be liked by somebody that is not respectable.

And I think when you find yourself in a position where people who are respectable do actually like you, you start to like yourself a little bit more because you’ve made sacrifices. You have to have made sacrifices in order to drop the person that you were to become this different version of yourself.

The Metamorphosis Process

And that process is so painful because you shed your identities and you shed people that you thought you needed to be dependent upon. But as soon as you shed that, it’s almost like a butterfly. You metamorphosize into this new person.

You will repeat that process over and over again because of the confidence that it brings you. And you like yourself. And when you like yourself, there’s nothing better on this planet.

I love my husband, I love my team members, I love my parents, my brother. There’s no amount of, there’s no greater joy that I have than actually being my own best friend.

And I don’t say that from a “I’m just going to hold your hand and I’m just going to be best friends with myself.” I am brutally honest with myself about what I am bad at, what I am good at, and I don’t over-index either way. I’m just honest with myself because I want to like me.

Being Your Own Best Friend

And when you like you because you’ve put in work that you have to do to not lie to yourself about what you want, then the world is open for you to pursue whatever opportunities because you like yourself and you’re good with yourself.

And that actually attracts more people who want to do cool shit with you because most people don’t like themselves and they’re not their own best friend and they think that that’s silly, but they are so mean to themselves.

And I get that because I used to be so mean to myself and so critical. Nobody would ever say to me what I would say to myself. I would never say to a friend of mine or even my worst enemy what I used to say to myself.

And I had to work on rewiring myself to understand why I was so critical and why I was so mean to myself. To stop doing that and to stop acting in that way that then allowed me to work on the things and fix the things I didn’t like about myself.

Avoiding Escapism

For instance, I used to watch way too much reality television. I hated that I watched as much reality television as I watched. But I loved all of the Real Housewives, everything on Bravo.

But it made me feel crappy because I liked their lives instead of liking my own life. And when you like somebody else’s life and you’re living into something that you don’t feel good about, you end up being really rude to yourself for obvious reasons.

You’re not creating the thing that you want, you’re just circumventing. You’re shortcutting it and that stuff to me is just as powerful and maybe even just as harmful of a drug as hard drugs and alcohol, because it’s escapism.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Natalie, thank you. And I’m very excited to sit again with you at some point in the future and get an update on your PPFs, how you’re getting on.

NATALIE DAWSON: I appreciate that. Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Please keep doing what you’re doing.

NATALIE DAWSON: Appreciate you.

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