Steven Sashen is a serial entrepreneur, former stand-up comic, and Masters All-American sprinter. He started his latest business, Xero Shoes, with his wife, Lena Phoenix, almost by accident. They appeared on Shark Tank, turning down a $400,000 offer from Kevin O’Leary.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
He does not believe in role models
When business started difficulties overcame:
“I never had anything to overcome I just started businesses and then you deal with everything that happens on a daily basis but there’s not a specific thing to overcome, there’s things that happen along the way as you’re building a business, financing, hiring, firing but there’s nothing that one needs to overcome in order to start”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets Book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Stumbling on Happiness Book by Daniel Gilbert
- On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not Book by Robert A Burton
Favourite Quote:
- Just do it
- A journey of a thousand miles is a single step
Recommended Online Resources:
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“Get a government job with a pension as fast as you can, start young and I wish I could say that I’m joking but I’m not for 2 reasons, the first is if someone could have convinced me that it was possible to find a government job that I would have found interesting, that would have allowed me to work a fixed number of hours per day or per week without obsessing about what I was doing in every one of the remaining hours and that after some number of years of doing that when I would have been happy, I could have retired on a significant pension without having to worry about what I did for income for the rest of my life, that would have been really awesome”…[Listen for More]
More About Steven Sashen:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives.” Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
Other Quotes From the Chat with Steven Sashen:
- “Those things that lead to things collapsing are highly understandable and highly reproducible”
- “We think that if we’re somehow able to accomplish getting this thing that we will in fact become happy, which if you find a million people who’ve gotten that thing that you want you’ll discover that they’re no more or less happy than you are”
- “Freud did not study psychology”
- “We don’t know what we’re doing, anyone that tells you they do is either lying or setting themselves up for failure”
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