Transcript of Jedidiah Collins: Triple Your Chances of Scaling to Nine Figures With This One Mindset Shift | E11 New

You're most likely not going to succeed as an entrepreneur. It's just too damn hard. Just like athletes do, there's a 2.5% chance to get a college scholarship, a 1% chance of going pro. You gotta be comfortable with those odds.

My next guest went undrafted, was cut 13 times, and still became the starting fullback for the New Orleans Saints.

One of my coaches used to call me Freddy Krueger, and he just said, Jed, 13 times, man, you're a tough man to kill.

While still playing in the NFL, he earned his Certified Financial Planner certification because he realized he had no idea what to do with his own paycheck.

grew up in Orange County, California, around a lot of money. And I looked in the locker room and I said, man alive, if I have no idea what I'm doing with this paycheck, what's the likelihood these non-accounting majors have any idea?

Today he's known as the Fullback of Finance, the founder of Money Vehicle, a bestselling author, and he's teaching thousands of athletes and students nationwide how to speak the language of money.

I'm not an advisor. I have no clients. There's no account. I'm never gonna ask you for your money. I'm here to just allow you to speak the language and start to fish on your own.

So you don't believe in work-life balance. Why should entrepreneurs stop chasing balance?

Oh my gosh.

My next guest went undrafted, was cut 13 times, and still became the starting fullback for the New Orleans Saints. But what Jed Collins built after football might be even more impressive than what he survived on the field. While still playing in the NFL, he earned his Certified Financial Planner certification because he realized he had no idea what to do with his own paycheck. Today, he's known as the Fullback of Finance, the founder of Money Vehicle, a bestselling author, and he's teaching thousands of athletes and students nationwide how to speak the language of money. Jedediah Collins, welcome to Business MVP.

Sammy, appreciate the opportunity. Obviously, a quote I love to live by is never delay gratitude. So thank you for the opportunity to share my message for the listeners. I'm just truly grateful for your time. I know we are competing with literally everything in the world, so Hopefully this is gonna bring some value to you today.

Agreed. Thank you. So Jed, you were cut 13 times in the NFL. Yeah. 13. Most people hear cut once and they're like, I'm out. Right? Assume the dream is over. What made you keep showing up?

Uh, yes. A baker's dozen. Um, I attribute this back to my childhood. We were just talking, uh, before you got 3 boys. So I grew up one of 5 children, but the middle 3 were all boys and we had 5 in 7 years. So there was, there was a lot of kids running around. Very close in age. In our backyard, my dad— despite my football background, I'm a basketball family. Both brothers actually ended up playing Division I college basketball, as well as my father playing college basketball. So we grew up in the backyard playing basketball, never even touching a football, never even considering it. And my dad created a game called King for a Day, where the 3 brothers would play one-on-one-on-one basketball. And the victor, the winner, would be king for that day, getting to boss the other 2 brothers around. I'm thirsty, go get me a drink. My dad would say, hey, you know, take— somebody's got to take out the trash. The king would get to, uh, tell the 2 who, who was taking out the trash. And I remember—

I'm never gonna do this.

Yeah, this is— ah, there are pros and cons to it. We can get into those. I, I remember very vividly of the hundreds, thousands of times we played king for a day in our backyard, the 2 days I walked off as king. I was the youngest brother. I was a year and a half to 2 and a half years their senior, and they were just better growing up. They were physically more dominant, and I just was not winning. I remember going out onto that court and looking and realizing, I'm not gonna win. Like, I'm not gonna be king. That's not because I wasn't good. It's just they were better than me. And realizing that my message to myself had to be, Even if you're not king, Jed, did you get better? Did you get a steal? Did you get a rebound? Did you get another point? Did you score today? Looking and seeing that the result, the scoreboard, wasn't really gonna be my reflection, but it was going to be this mindset of continual improvement in myself. That mentality really introduced me to another view of failing. So many people, like you said, they, they get cut once, they fail once, and they turn around and walk in a new direction.

I look at failure very differently. F-A-I-L, my first attempt in learning. And I learned that on that court in my backyard playing King for a Day. This was not the end. This was not the result I was looking for, but it was always the progress in myself. So, as I got cut, transferred around the NFL, I was looking every time and saying, hey, I failed. I got my garbage bag. I'm cleaning out my locker. They gave me a plane ticket home. But what am I gonna take away from this? Where did I improve? Who around me could I steal from that is gonna allow me to be a better fullback and eventually a better human being? And so that mentality started when I was just a young kid in a backyard, went through the NFL, you know, earning really the kind of the mentality and messaging behind it. But as you become an entrepreneur, which most athletes today are their own business and are entrepreneurs, You're gonna realize you fail every day. That's the part of business. Business is hard. You are always taking the food off somebody's table. And so you have to go into it with that mentality of, I can die a thousand deaths.

And it, it's that question of what is it gonna ultimately take to break you? And I came to a realization mostly from football and from this mindset is I decide my breaking point. And as long as I'm still alive, I can keep going to the point, and I'll end here, but one of my coaches used to call me Freddy Krueger, and he just said, Jed, 13 times, man, you're a tough man to kill. Like, you just keep coming back.

Yeah.

And that meant that was a mantra of mine, especially being a lead blocking fullback. I'm a tough man to kill.

Yeah, I love that, but that is a pretty high threshold. I will acknowledge that.

It wasn't fun. I'm not gonna say—

Yeah.

Now I did journal throughout it, and so I get to look back on it and people tell me like, yeah, hey, I don't wanna, I don't wanna write or capture when I'm down. And I look at them and I say, those are the best times. Like you need to capture when you are losing.

Mm-hmm.

Because it makes the winning that much sweeter.

Yeah, no, I agree. And we'll, we'll get to that as well. Yeah. But I wanna, I wanna capitalize on something you just mentioned about, you know, stealing from the people around you. Mm-hmm. So you've said that every time you walk into a new building, your job was to from the best in the world. So what does that mean?

One, it, it, it makes you realize greatness is lonely. The, the people you admire, the people who are most successful, are doing things that the average person doesn't. And that's what I really wanted to tap into. I would get cut and I would leave a building and I would think to myself, usually on the plane ride home, what was that 8, 9-year offensive lineman doing? What was that 20-year kicker doing? What was that 15-year safety What were the skills? What were the attributes that they were doing that I wasn't obviously doing enough that I was asked to leave? And it began to kind of unfold to me in this almost unspoken code. I, I call it rookie to veteran. It's a mentality and it's a mindset of how do you go from a rookie trying to survive to a veteran finding success? It's all based on your daily principles and habits. Everything is a system. I got to work next to Drew Brees. I got to work next to Megatron Calvin Johnson. But I would also look at guys who were, again, a 20-year kicker is somebody who is historic in my eyes because every year they're trying to replace that guy.

A gentleman in Detroit named Don Muehlbach, the Mule, played 20 years as a long snapper. And that means he did not make a mistake for 20 years. There's greatness in that. So, even though long snapping may not have been your career path, what can you see around you that you wanna steal. And a lot of people hesitate and go, Jed, don't tell young people to steal. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. I wanted to take that, that action, that little thing, and begin to make it my own. And that's when you start to see who you become. Greats are all a piece of a lot of the things that came before them. You listen to Kobe Bryant, who studied Michael Jordan like he was his own subject matter and his science. And it— one of those messages hit me while I was in Kansas City. I was, uh, so we, we would get divided into 3 groups. You have your skilled guys who everybody knows from fantasy football, your big guys who if they walked in the room you'd know who the big guys are, and then this middle group called the big skills who were the hybrids— linebackers, tight ends, fullbacks.

I was in this big skill group which allowed me to work out with the linebackers. And 15-year linebacker, I started studying him and saying, man, how in the heck do you survive 15 years as a middle linebacker? That just baffled me. And I would start watching him out on the field. We would run 40 yards, he'd run 45. We'd run 50, he'd run 55. We'd go in the weight room, we would do a set of 10, he would encourage us, and then he would slide on 2.£5 and do a set of 11. We would go get 2 game tapes, he would get a 3rd. And so finally I looked at him and we were in a locker room. I looked at him, I said, I don't get it. Like, is it just hard for you? You're, you're an old man now. Is it hard for you to slow down on the field? Like £5 on a bench press? What is £5 ever going to do? And he started to share with me his mentality. He said, every day I come in and I steal an inch. I steal this little thing. That's the £5.

That's the 5 yards. That's the extra thing. I don't think the young guys are doing that keeps me here. I am 15 years into this. I'm slower, I'm more expensive, I'm more banged up, but I come in and I steal that because an inch leads to a yard, a yard to a first down, a first down to a touchdown, touchdowns to wins, and wins get us to the Super Bowl. And so what that mentality showed me was everywhere I went, could I steal an inch? And a lot of those inches came from watching greatness. and just duplicating what they were until it became who I was.

Yeah, I love that. That's a, that's a great way to think about things. So you went from undrafted to the starting fullback for the New Orleans Saints, sharing a locker room with Drew Brees, you just mentioned, and some of the best players in the league. So what did competing at that level build in you that translated directly to business?

Oh, one, I got a taste of what it was like to be the best in the world. So I actually was rated the number 1 fullback, making me the best in the world. I was a Pro Bowl player going from getting cut 13 times to that level.

That's great.

What it introduces you to is that quote I already said is greatness is lonely. If you want to be a successful business, you're gonna have to do things most people aren't willing to do. As a 17-year-old business athlete, as a 22-year-old in college or a 27-year-old, You realize that as an athlete, I have to make— we don't call them sacrifices, we call them priorities. My priority is I got to get up in the morning and work out, so I'm not going to that party. Like, that's just the exchange. What it allowed me to do was to go into my entrepreneurial journey and, A, accept that I'm going to fail every day. That had to be the— I love talking to young people about starting their own business. I tell them there's a reason they call it crazy genius. You have to be crazy first. Entrepreneurs see something nobody else thinks is really there. That's what an entrepreneur is, is a visionary and a dreamer. If you see something that nobody else sees, that makes you a crazy person. Make it come to fruition and you become a genius, but you were crazy until that reality set in.

So the ability that I could see myself as a starting fullback in the NFL before anyone, anyone could see that. That was the quality that you need to start as an entrepreneur. But then you go sit next to a Drew Brees for 4 years and you realize this guy is anything if he's a habit. Everything is a process. Everything is a system. And it's focused on the reward. It's focused on the, the point of why we're doing so many things. And I remember asking Drew, again, I'm an undrafted no-name, got cut a dozen times. So I go into the building like, I gotta do things that everybody is going to see as a little different. One of those was be a part of the breakfast club. I wanted to be the first guy in the building. Why? Because I, you know, coaches would walk in and say, oh, Collins is already here. I like that guy. The one dude in New Orleans who beat me in every day was the franchise, was the $100 million man, Drew Brees. I would walk down a dark alley past me, dark meeting room, dark meeting room, and you get to the quarterbacks and there's a guy sitting with perfect posture watching film at 5:15 in the morning.

And you're like, uh-huh, Drew, the sun's not up, bro. Like, really? Like slouch in your chair.

Right.

But it was this idea that if I was going to be a successful entrepreneur, nobody was gonna tell me where to go. Nobody was gonna tell me what to do, and nobody was gonna tell me how to get there. I had to create the habits and the systems within myself. And so, I started to build those routines, no different than waking up and going into the Breakfast Club workout. My daughters look at me now and they're like, Dad, like, you still get up and go work out this morning at my gym? People are like, man, you're 40 and still squatting? It's just, it's a habit. It's a routine. It's part of who I am. So, the ability to think like you're a crazy genius and to see something nobody else does, And the ability to translate all of those assets of discipline, creature of habit, routine processes. That's how you begin your entrepreneurial journey. But all of that still comes back to the idea that you're most likely not going to succeed as an entrepreneur. It's just too damn hard. So you have to be willing, just like athletes do. There's a 2.5% chance to get a college scholarship, a 1% chance of going pro.

You gotta be comfortable with those odds, not as an investor, but as a business.

Yep. No, I agree with that. That's great advice. So you were an accounting major and you still weren't prepared for your first NFL paycheck. Yeah. That moment changed everything for you. Walk me through what happened and why did you, and why you decided to earn your CFP while still playing?

Yeah, still an embarrassing kind of realization, but my, my rookie year, I got that active game check from the Cleveland Browns. And back then, partly because they knew athletes weren't good businesses, most of the teams wouldn't do direct deposit. Most of the teams handed you a physical check. You had to go deposit. Now, I got in many a player's car and would pick up a piece of mail and it was like, you know, there's $70,000 on this thing. Like, can we go, can we swing by the bank and put this in there? What they didn't understand was if 10 players didn't deposit 70 grand, The Cleveland Browns got $700,000 of interest to earn on those dollars until it transferred and got deposited. Part of why they didn't want to do the, the automatic deposit.

Interesting.

So I get this first check and before I even get to go to the bank and deposit it, I've already spent every dime of my first active NFL game check. Now, it was a beautiful mistake, and I will say this to her face 17 years later, she's still around. I bought an engagement ring. So an unbelievable investment. Greatest investment.

That's a good investment. Yeah. Yeah.

Best investment of my life. Poor financial habit. Spending money before you get money is not the way you create wealth. And I looked at it, as you mentioned, I was an accounting, uh, major. I have a business degree. I grew up in Orange County, California around a lot of money. And I looked in the locker room and I said, man alive, if I have no idea what I'm doing with this paycheck, What's the likelihood these non-accounting majors have any, any idea? And so I really tried to challenge that of like the, the, the ESPN Broke documentary, 72% of pro athletes go broke, you know, within 5 years of their career. I looked at that and I said, Jed, you are a no-name, barely. If you're gonna make it, you're barely hanging on to make it. What is preventing you from being a 70% going broke? Knowledge, education, really addressing how do I, just like I was gonna make the team, how do I do things differently than everybody else? And so, I would take each offseason, and it started not with the CFP, it started with Rich Dad Poor Dad, it started with Suze Orman, it started with Dave Ramsey.

My now wife and I would actually go into a Borders bookstore and would just pull books off the shelf, go get a coffee and sit down, read for an hour, and then put the book back and, and head out. I, we, in my aisle was the personal finance aisle. Like, what could I go learn? Again, one of my principles in Rookie to Veteran is finding graybeards, which are just mentors. A mentor of mine challenged me and I would ask, he was a financial advisor and I'd ask him 100 questions. What should I do here? How do you do this? And eventually he looked at me and he goes, Jed, I love these questions. But instead of giving you the fish, I think you should learn how to fish on your own. And he introduced me to the CFP, Certification of Financial Planning. And so each offseason of my 7-year career, I started taking one of those prerequisites to go and become a, a financial advisor or wealth manager. And it changed everything about what I saw this almighty dollar. I started to look at money and not just say, how do I go to work to earn more?

But how do I make it go to work for me? And that's really where that money vehicle mindset shift in me started was I didn't wanna see money as the destination. I wanted to see money as a vehicle that was gonna take me to where I wanted to go. But again, that comes back to what did I understand about this language? I wrote down in 2008 in one of my journals, I wanna come back and teach my brotherhood, the NFL, you know, players, This language of money that nobody taught me. I'm proud to say I get to do that. I visited 12 NFL teams this offseason. I teach 1,000+ NFL players and professional athletes each year. But it is the idea that I stand in front of them and say, I'm one of you. I've been in your shoes. I know where you are. I want nothing from you. I'm not an advisor. I have no clients. There's no account. I'm never going to ask you for your money. I'm here to just allow you to speak the language and start to fish on your own and ask those people who are now working for you what exactly it is that they do and how they're helping you capture this dream.

So that one paycheck led me on a path that 18, 20 years later, I get to say, hey, it was the beautiful mistake that started this journey.

So everyone understands, you spent 5 years in wealth management after retiring, and then you pivoted to education. you said your passion wasn't helping people end their financial journey. It was empowering people who had never spoken the language of money to begin theirs.

Mm-hmm.

So give us a little more on how did Money Vehicle come to life and what's been the hardest part of scaling it?

Ooh, great questions. Uh, thanks. So yes, working, working with wealth managers again, it was just like playing in the NFL. These were the best in the business. Like I, I learned, I actually brought you know, a little notebook. And my goal was 2 things every day. What 2 things every day I did I learn? Now, here is where I was starting. I was 30, you know, after playing in the NFL, going into an office setting for the first time. Control+V was paste. Like little things was like day one. Jed, day one was learning how to live in an office. And one of those humbling realities of being in corporate America, nobody claps for you. Like, I think if we could incorporate some clapping, like a lot more office settings would be a little more, more manageable.

Yeah.

But I was helping families and it was, it's very neat to see a $2 million family become a 4 or a 5 become a 10. But I went back to kind of where I was and who I ultimately wanted to help. I wanted to help people start speaking this language. And so I wanted to begin their journeys. I didn't wanna be the person that they found after the windfall, after the big money. Let it be clear as a business, That was a, that was a very poor decision. I was chasing a passion to help people. I was not chasing profits to build a company. Wealth management, great industry, great advisors, just wasn't what I wanted to wake up in 5, 10, 20 years doing. And so, I looked at who I wanted to help and I started to say in 2015, I wish somebody would've taught me this in high school. I wish somebody would've walked me through what a paycheck was, how to use it, how to protect it. What the hell taxes are back when I, before I was getting those checks. And so, one of my skills is I have a sister who has special needs.

And so, communicating with sis has allowed me to make a lot of the translatable, the things I understand translatable to a simpler level. That was gonna be taking my certification of financial planning and not trying to teach you the entire alphabet of what that was, But can I teach you A, B, and C in a simple story-like element? And so I started to go, even while I was in wealth management, I would go to high schools and colleges and companies and start to teach these introductory financial classes until I got the confidence to take that leap of faith and say, this is what I would love to do. Follow this passion instead of just getting a great paycheck and staying on this traditional path. And so, in 2020, January 1st, 2020, I launched out and started my own business that was gonna be Jed the Speaker and Jed the Financial Literacy Curriculum. 3 months into my business, a little thing called COVID broke out and Jed the Speaker got killed for a few years. And so, it challenged that second question you asked, which was, well, how do you scale it? How do you scale Jed?

in a box. And that, that forced me down this edtech path, which believe me, as a fullback, I never envisioned myself going down.

Yeah.

But I started to look at schools and I started to say, if I could create something that could go and not replace the teacher, but provide the subject matter expertise and the silliness in the education for the in-class teacher, that's where I think I could have this hybrid classroom of benefit. And during COVID we filmed hundreds of videos. Um, today, you know, it is a full-fledged financial literacy curriculum that is used in about 22 states nationwide. I will say 2015, there was only about 6 states that had passed a financial literacy curriculum law. Today there's about 42. So I don't wanna say I was right, but it is moving in the direction of every high school student in America will need to take financial literacy to graduate. And the scaling side was where I hit my biggest challenges because it was no longer could Jed work harder. It was how do you hire and find a team of people who are gonna allow you to grow beyond yourself? And to any young entrepreneur, Sammy, I got to meet some of your team. Team is everything. It's, it's no longer what you are great. You, you gonna work your butt off.

But it's the things you don't touch. It's the things you don't do. Are they gonna meet and exceed the level and the standard that you set for yourself? That is the hardest thing I, I will ever have to do is find people who are as passionate about my thing as I am.

Mm-hmm.

And right. I think, uh, uh, one of the humbling realities as an entrepreneur is you're never gonna find people more passionate than you are, but can you encourage them to use their skills and talents to see the bigger vision?

We talk about that a lot on this show, kind of surrounding yourself with maybe people that are smarter than you or better at something than you are, right? Because a lot of people's fear is that they're gonna be replaced or, you know, they're not gonna be seen as good, but really that's just holding you back, right? So, that's the same concept.

Yeah.

So, you also built Rookie to Veteran, a coaching framework helping athletes in the NFL, NBA, and NWSL translate their skills into whatever comes next. And you've been talking about this a lot. How do you run multiple businesses at once?

Wake up early and work hard as everyone. Yeah. No, it's the same kind of thoughts I had as a, as an, as a player. I have as a business, uh, a founder, an entrepreneur. Um, I look at them not all as separate so much, but as how do they all connect under the Fullback of Finance umbrella? Jed speaks money. I speak mindset. I speak memories, money, mindset, memories. All lead to how do I help the end individual, which is usually a 15-year-old high school, a 20-year-old college, or a 25-year-old athlete. That's who I'm trying to empower. And so, as I can continue to see how all roads lead to the empowerment of that individual, I try not to see them as separate. I try to see them as unifying, but it is having different brains and different brands. I look a lot at what makes me a good speaker is actually a detriment and makes me less of a good businessman. And if you ever read a book called E-Myth, you realize an entrepreneur needs to have different facets. I am much more the creator than I am the organizer or the task manager, the project manager.

And so I needed to find people who were gonna, hey, no, no, no, no, I get it. You, you got this, you woke up and there's this big pie in the sky thing up here. This is what we're gonna do today. And so it was that I was never a, does anybody question that Jed's gonna put in work today? It was Jed's dreams. Are we at the right focus at this moment of what he should be focusing on? And balancing different companies and businesses allows you to, you know, humbly look at that and say, hey, today I need to focus on X. Tomorrow I get to go dream and play with Y. But I do have a lot of young people tell me, hey, I, I, I, you chased your passion and I think that's amazing. I wanna go do that one day cuz I wanna control my, my time and I wanna make all the money. And I humbly look at them and I go, well, number one, I wake up at 5:15 on Saturday so I can work for an hour or two before my kids and family wake up. You don't control your time.

You never turn off. And that's the difference people don't understand about entrepreneurs is We're always working. We're always thinking about it. And the make all the money comment, I laugh and just smile and go, you have, after taxes, which you don't have any idea how much taxes is gonna take, you gotta pay everything from your employees to your Microsoft subscription to heck, getting on a plane and going somewhere for a workshop. So it is not something I encourage students to do. Because if my encouragement forces you down a road you shouldn't go, you're gonna, you're gonna hit a lot of struggle. I challenge and actually tell students, I don't think you should do it, to see their response and to see if they have that fight. Because as an entrepreneur, you know this, you gotta wake up swinging every morning. And again, you gotta be able to, to fail on a daily basis. And Mike Tyson said it best, everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. You're gonna get punched in the face. And I've, I've gone into, to meetings with tears almost in my eyes because the meeting before I lost a big contract or a big client.

And then you just click over and it's like, Jed, turn it back on. You gotta go hunt again. Um, right. So you, you gotta have that resolve.

Yeah. And I mean, I feel like your football career really prepared you for that.

So, absolutely. And King for a Day.

What's the hard— yeah. King for a Day. What's the hardest business decision you've had to make? And then I'm assuming your background helped shape how you handled that.

Yeah. Hardest business decision I've had to make. I would go back to the people. Uh, it's not just the management of it, but it's when am I willing to admit I made a mistake and say, Sammy, I appreciate you helping me, and I know we are working together on this dream, but at this time it's not gonna work going forward. So I would say, yeah, firing people from, from the, the job is the hardest. Because I love people. I want to give them a chance. I want somebody to see— my biggest mistake is I want to give all the undrafted an opportunity. I know you don't have the resume. I know you haven't done this before, but together we're going to go surprise a lot of people. And unfortunately, not everybody is a hidden gem that you get to find. So the hardest decisions for me have been— Who do I delegate to? I can't have my fingerprints on everything. So who do I allow somebody else to do something and hand it to a client or a customer and say, I believe and trust that they're gonna deliver what I would've delivered? That's a difficult one.

But then you do, you start to approach that question of scale. Something I did not do as an entrepreneur at the forefront, which in today's day and age with AI and technology, I think is just necessary, is you gotta start thinking about the, not just the one, but the thousand. Like, yeah, how did we do this for one person? How are we gonna do this for 1,000 people? That idea of scale is a, a question of just that. Again, I'm not the tech guy. I'm not the, the builder coder. Those questions were where I had to go find people.

You know, I think based on what you saw and then what you lived with the paycheck and seeing those around you, like, not know how to spend their money or how to invest or all those things, you know, obviously that's where you saw the opportunity. But it's just interesting because financial literacy is obviously a hot topic now, and you were already kind of doing that and teaching, you know, to college athletes before the NIL ever existed, right? And now, there's even more opportunity out there because people actually are like, okay, I really do need to focus on this and learn about this. So it's just, it's kind of cool cuz you were kind of ahead of it. So it was kind of interesting.

That's the game. You know, you listen to the, the tech, the biggest tech founders, Nvidia's founder today, it's no longer are you the smartest person in the room. And that's great for people like me. I'm not the smartest person in, in most rooms, but it's what's coming, what's around the corner. Can you see the, the trend that is beginning? I saw it because I had the personal pain and I was in an environment where I saw people hurting from it drastically and dramatically. But you're absolutely right. I have people ask me all the time like, oh, Jed, like, is there somebody else like you? And I go, well, yeah, tell them to go 20 years ago, play a professional sport, become a certified financial planner, and then go teach people for a decade and they'll be just like me. And the person usually goes, oh, okay, sorry. And it is. I appreciate that shout out because, yeah, a lot of people have run into financial literacy because a lot of money is being poured into young people. And unfortunately, there are a lot of sharks in this world. Why I want to maintain the idea that I don't have clients, and I get asked this offseason, 12 NFL teams, every workshop ends with, Jed, will you be my guy?

No, I'm not here to do that. I don't want to be On your team. I wanna be your teammate and teach you how to go have those conversations. Um, so it is, it is trying to keep my waters pure and clean where a lot of people are getting into it as a quote unquote loss leader for clients.

I, I love that. So what is the one financial mistake you see people making over and over regardless of how much money they have?

I'm gonna focus on athletes just cuz that's who I talk to a lot.

Sure.

We as athletes accept, in the beginning of my book, I give this kind of football contract of what you are gonna experience as injuries, as guaranteed injuries and hurts, and what are your likelihoods of success? And you see those odds and you go, I'm gonna beat those odds. I'm gonna defy it. As a business, as an investor, we have to totally change our mindset. And I don't care if you are a high school athlete or a professional making $50 million, whatever dollars, You have to start thinking different. As an athlete, we focus on days. Every day is in preparation for this year. As a business, we gotta go from days to decades. We gotta really start challenging ourselves to think longer term. And so, the mistake we make as athletes, I get asked a lot about futures and swaps and leveraged deals and can I get 10 homes on real estate if I take out all these loans? We look at the risk and we say, I can defy the odds. I can beat all the risks. And we don't really take a step back and go, well, number one, do you need to? If you get $200,000 at 18, like your life is significantly changed if we do this the right way.

So most athletes look at investing like they look at their game. I'm gonna put in the work and I'm gonna defy the odds. And what I really want them to start to see is Diversification is not a weakness, it's a protection. And it's the idea that I get at 20 to use the one thing every investor in the world wants more of, which is time. There is no exponential influencer of compound interest more than time. So I want athletes to start thinking in decades like a business and not investing on day to day. I tell people, in 2009, I became an investor because of my research and because of my studies and because I was getting a little bit of a paycheck. I haven't looked at the stock market since. Why? Because I'm not trying to sell. It's not my time. It, my time is in 20, 30 years. And they go, but Jed, you're the money guy. Like, aren't you supposed to see stocks on a daily basis? No, because I don't, it, it doesn't bother me. It doesn't impact me. I look in decades. You tell me in 10 years what that stock is.

Yeah.

Too short term.

There you go. And so it's, it's a, a funny joke, but I really do try to get them to understand 20 years later, I don't know, but it, I'm, I'm told it's up. Like, that's all that matters because time is on my side and I'm using it as that resource.

Yeah, I love that. That's good advice. So if you could go back and tell your younger self one thing about what building a business actually requires, what would it be?

Oh my gosh. Again, if you're gonna take, if you're gonna chase a passion, realize you're gonna take a cut in your paycheck. So everybody said, everybody, a lot of billionaires are like, oh, kids, chase your passion. You know, it's gonna—

yeah.

Forget that.

There's some, some sacrifice there.

There's all sacrifice. You are saying, I, you, you don't get to have your cake and eat it too. If, if you wanna chase a vision and a dream, realize I didn't take a salary for a few years. Like, and I could do that because of where I was in my life from football, which again is a one in a million opportunity. So, Be careful saying I'm going to chase a passion. But I would say, and this actually hits home even more, a few days ago I was up for my morning run and I'm very regimented. So each day has its thing. So one day a week I run and I was out on a run and I was crossing at a stop sign and the truck goes past and I wave them on. I say, all right. And then a car is driving up, they start to slow down and I give them the customary, all right, hey, Thank you for stopping at a stop sign. I'm going to cross the street. I start running across. This car doesn't stop. It upends me. I roll up on the hood, hit the ground.

Oh my gosh.

Pop up. Yeah. Oh, it was bad news.

Oh my God.

You okay? Horribly, Sammy. I've been through quite a few car accidents in my day. And yeah, my body from football, I'm sore for sure.

But yeah.

I stand up from getting hit and I look at the driver and it's this elderly woman with big kind of Coke bottle glasses on.

Oh my.

And my first thought is, get out from in front of the car. This woman's gonna kill you. And so I scoot to the side. She takes off, doesn't stop, doesn't roll down her window.

Oh my.

Doesn't check on me. She gone. This probably not the first time she's— so what does this story teach me about business? Most of the thing I'm sitting there on my run worrying about my day, worrying about meetings, worrying about all the things that I, and I get hit by a car. You need to focus on what you control and stop worrying about the millions of things that may or could happen. As a young business, you are gonna, I've sat with 100 young hustlers, men and women who start showing me numbers and things and scale and When— this is what it is when we have 10 people, and then when we have 10 million, look at how much money there is. You don't control that stuff. Don't tell me about the scale before you can control it. Mow your grass is one of the greatest sayings I heard in the football world, which just means the only yard I can mow is the one in front of my house. Focus on what you can control— your attitude, your preparation, your effort— things that you are 100% That's gonna be what makes your business successful. Because if you're banking on, oh, if Sammy introduces me to this person and then this happens, we go from 1,000 to 10,000.

I don't control any of that. So one of the things I wish I would've focused and dialed down more early in was what do I control and what do I not control?

Yeah. I mean, I think that could apply to your athletic career or your, you know, entrepreneurial career. So absolutely.

You don't control the coach. You don't control the ref. You don't control your opponent.

You only control like your performance, right? Your attitude. So, I love that. Same in work, right? So, this is something I found really interesting that I've heard you talk about, and I wanted to hear more about it. So, and, and I don't hear this preached a lot. So, you don't believe in work-life balance, right? And so, a lot of people preach work-life balance. So, you believe in what's called intentional imbalance. So what does that mean and why should entrepreneurs stop chasing balance?

Again, greatness is lonely. Uh, if you want to achieve something nobody else is going to achieve, you have to be willing to do things that nobody else is willing to do. Uh, this is a conversation I'm having with my 12 and 10-year-olds. I'm not asking them to be great athletes because I know the balance that it takes to be a great athlete. I see some of them in the gym, on the field, You look at them and you go, that kid is 12 and they're that good? I know what they've been doing all week. I know what my girls are doing, which is hanging out with their friends and having a good time. So that balance is, if you want to be okay or better or good, have a balance. If you want greatness, be ready to look at it and say, I cannot expect to be at this level when— It, and, and expect that rising to that level is going to be easy. And that's really what I mean with the balance side is if I could wake up every morning and have breakfast with my family and walk my kids to school and then go do a little bit of work and then pick them up and then go coach their thing and then go and be, and be the greatest dad and the greatest businessman, everybody in the world would.

But you need to identify what is your phase of life, because these are not choices that if I make it today, I gotta make it again in 5 or 10 or 20 years. Where am I right now? And the beautiful focus of your imbalance is, at this moment in my life, this is what I want most over what I want right now. And that is the greatest skill of life. Can you prioritize what you want most over what I want right now? Right now, I want to sleep in. Right now, I want a donut. Right now, I want to take the day off. What I want most is Go to the Super Bowl. Great.

Right.

That is a decision that you're going to have to make on a day-to-day basis, and not everybody's going to understand it. I love talking to middle school boys around the neighborhood because their dads are actually coming and going, you know, Johnny is kind of getting pushed out by his friend group because he wants to go and train. He wants to go shoot hoops. He wants to go do this, and they want to just go fart around. Johnny is not balanced. Johnny wants it. He wants something most, more than any of his friends even understand. And so that's the— I say that because so many young people are being told, chase a passion and have a balance. That comes great when you're a millionaire in your 40s, 50s, or 60s. Right now, if you want something that most of your friend group doesn't have, or most of the people you look around don't have, You really gotta welcome and accept, I'm willing to do things they're not. That's, I mean, the epitome of Jed as a fullback. I was a linebacker in high school, I was a tight end in college. I didn't know anything to know about fullback.

What I realized was I had to be willing to either handle or give pain more than other guys on the field. Look at an NFL linebacker and say, he wants this less than I do. He won't, he don't wanna hit me. He wants to tackle the guy behind me. I'm willing to exert the pain. That's when they started to fear me. And it was that shift in that change in mindset of who and what are you willing, and then what is the ultimate goal? And if I'm willing to do things others aren't, I'm gonna be able to achieve things others won't.

Yeah. And I think in, and like we said, it's the same in business, right? So it's having that mindset. So, I love that. That's great. So, I wanna go back to, you mentioned about journaling, and I think that's really important and something that we haven't talked enough about on here yet. So, you've kept a journal since your very first NFL practice, and it became the foundation for your book, Fourth and Goal. What has journaling given you that nothing else has?

Number one, I've kept a journal since high school. So, I've journaled for 20-plus years.

Even earlier.

Even earlier. Fourth and Goal is actually just my last season, 2014, my 7th year in the NFL. I ended up journaling every day of that year. I typically don't journal every day, but that year I did. A, I had my first daughter, and B, I knew this was probably going to be my last kind of go. And so I wanted to capture as much of it as I could. The thing I will say journaling gives me, and then I'll talk about one or two other attributes as well, The thing journaling gives me more than anything is the ability to travel through time. I can go meet 16-year-old Jed. I can go back to my wedding day or my honeymoon. I could go to my first NFL practice. I can go to some fun nights in college. I can travel through my life. That is a luxury that very few people have, and it's a gift because those memories have a dividend. Those memories I have turned into assets. Most of these stories I've shared with you today that I see the principle and see the message of is because I journaled about it. I didn't see it at the time.

Believe me, I didn't think like, oh, Judd got hit by a car. I'm gonna turn that into mow your grass. But it's the ability to see a story in your life. And as I look at this new age and era of artificial intelligence, It is gonna know everything. It is gonna be the greatest manager in the world. It will never be a leader, and it will never be able to tell me what your first-person experience is. That is one of two things I think it can never replace is my first-person experience. How do I capture my story is in a journal. And I think journaling over the next 10 to 20 years, kind of like I said about financial literacy 10 or 20 years ago, I think journaling is going to be the most desirable skill for a high school, college graduate, or an athlete as a business because it is the beginning of original thought, which AI cannot give you original thought. It is the beginning of your brand, who I am. You want to talk about self-identity and mental health? Journaling exceeds so many, so many drugs or short-term results or short-term excuse.

The ability to understand and identify who you are and then become a leader in the communication of what is the message I wanted to share? How do I really start to translate it? And so it is a, again, a skill I've had for 20 years. Never in my life did I think journaling was gonna be something that I started talking to people about over the last 2 or 3 years as AI's on the rise. Storytelling and becoming a leader have been 2 of the biggest gaps in young people. And I— everybody comes up to me after I talk on a keynote and I'm on a conference, they go, how do you do that? I've been journaling and telling stories to myself for 20 years. Start the practice. And so actually, in Fourth and Goal, again, not trying, but there are 100 journaling prompts throughout the book for a young athlete, for a young person to start capturing their story. So use, use my book, Cute Little Story, as a template, but it's just a template to say, okay, you read December 2nd, what would your response be to this scenario and situation? And that's the skill I want people to start to, to utilize.

Yeah, no, I think that's great advice. So what are you working on right now that you're most excited about and you wanna share?

Ooh. One, I mean, obviously Fourth and Goal. I just came out with a companion journal called Capture Your Story that a lot of athletic departments and teams are starting to gather. You know, not too many, like 17, 18. Yeah, I actually have a lot of 12, 15-year-olds going through. They're not reading, they're listening to the Audible, and then they're filling in their own Capture Your Story journal. The thing I'm working on right now that I'm excited about in, let's say, 6 months, 2027, Uh, is called the SOIL journal, which is Signs of Improvement List. This is something I have failed at. And Sammy, you're catching a theme here. Jed fail turns into Jed tries to solve a problem.

Yeah.

Parenting young athletes is one of the hardest challenges out there. One, everybody thinks they have a million-dollar baby. The amount of money in youth sports now is just absolutely exponential. But how do you Get them to focus on something other than all I do is win and winning is the goal and winning is— I hope you lose every game in 4th grade, in 6th grade. I hope you lose as much as you can, but are you improving? And so, it's changing the conversation from the parent to the athlete. What I want to do is give the parent the journal and say the athlete doesn't write anything down, but here is the conversation you're going to go have with your young athlete. This is gonna be the questions you ask them, and it is gonna frame not did they win, how did you improve? Where is the mentality and the mindset that you are getting better at? And that's really something that, again, I love that.

And that's called the Soil Journal.

Soil Journal. Yeah, it'll be out here in a few months.

Awesome.

Soil is gonna be based around that signs of improvement list, and it's meant to be an example for a parent. To have a conversation with their young athlete and not let them focus on the result, the scoreboard, but really see the signs of improvement. Your coach might not be playing you as much as you want. This might not happen. You might lose games. I hope you do lose because we learn a lot from losing. But it's, did I get better? The greatest example of this, I got to train with a guy named Darren Sproles who just set the NFL record for all-purpose yards in a season. And that offseason after that, I asked him, I'm like, Sprolesy, Man, like, who are you competing with? You just, you're in Canton. Like, you set an NFL record. And he said, I'm competing with the same guy I do every year, me. I want to be better today than I was yesterday. And I think if we kind of adopted more of that mindset, it would really help young people to see the goal is not to just win now, but it's to get better for tomorrow. And that's a life thing.

Sports is meant to be a message for life. And that's, I know, what you are teaching and what you're preaching here. And so, I think as we look at that conversation, the diagnostic and the screaming in the car on the way home is not where we're going to improve our kids. If we can set up a set standards time each week to really have this conversation and to see the growth and to see the enjoyment, that's going to be what we want to start documenting. And it's going to become that part of the story.

I love that. So thank you so much for your time today. I wanna end with our final question, which is, what does it mean to you to be a business MVP?

To be a business MVP to me means I am working on something I'm proud of. Again, I am a crazy person that believes in something that nobody else sees. I am building that every day with my, the things I control, with my work ethic, with my preparation, and most importantly, with my mentality and my attitude. And I'm continuing to be proud of where I am. And I think that is really the biggest struggle I, as somebody who has a lot of ambition and strive for, struggles with is, Jed, look at where you are right now and enjoy this moment. And so, I'm really trying to be a— MVP is really identifying that I have worked to be here and that this is a great place. This is exactly where I'm supposed to be right now. Now let's go make sure I'm, I'm in that place tomorrow and in a year and in a decade. And if I'm a business MVP, I'm working like an athlete day to day, but I'm thinking like a business decades, not days.

Yeah, I love that. So thank you so, so much for your time. This has been amazing. I hope everyone really enjoys this and, you know, gets a lot from it, 'cause you shared a lot of great insight and advice. So thank you very much.

Sammy, grateful for you and enjoy the rest of your day. And thank you for all the listeners. Welcome follow-up questions.

Thanks. And that's how champions think. Here are the key takeaways from my conversation with Jed today. Rejection is data, not a death sentence. Getting cut 13 times didn't end his story, it shaped it. Don't wait until the money is in your hand to learn what to do with it. Start the education now. And they're going to call you crazy until they call you a crazy genius. So keep going. If you got value from today's episode, share it with someone who's ready to think bigger, compete harder, and win in business. Make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an episode. And if you haven't, leaving a 5-star review goes a long way in helping us grow and reach more leaders like you. I'm Sami Peterson. Thanks for being part of the Business MVP Community, and I'll see you next time as we continue building you into an MVP in business, and in life.