The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster, with Darren Hardy – Episode 93 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

New York Times bestselling author Darren Hardy delivers a candid and practical look at why most entrepreneurs fail—and how to beat the odds. Hardy explains that the 66% small‑business failure rate is driven less by external factors like capital or competition and more by internal, emotional unpreparedness, lack of focus, and unrealistic expectations about the entrepreneurial journey. He explores the psychological cost of leaving the “herd,” including criticism, isolation, and resistance from peers, and reframes these challenges as evidence of progress, as well as covers effective sales as a discipline rooted in questioning and listening rather than pitching, the dangers of distraction in the modern digital age, and the importance of developing intense focus, discipline, and personal responsibility.

About Darren:

Darren Hardy has been a central leader in the success media industry now for nearly 30 years.
 Darren led three successful television networks, executive producing over 1,000 TV shows. For nearly a decade, Darren was the visionary force behind the rebirth of SUCCESS Magazine as its publisher and founding editor. These positions have given him unparalleled access to the insights and strategies of the most successful industry players on the planet, including Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Howard Schultz, Steve Wynn, Jack Welch, and many more. As a trusted advisor and personal mentor to top CEOs and business leaders, Darren Hardy has helped shape the positive impact of several million enterprises through the training in his Business Master Class. More than 350,000 global achievers start their day with his award-winning morning show for achievers—Darren Daily.
 Darren and his passionately committed A-Team positively impact the lives of more than 1.6 billion people annually through their mission initiatives.
 Darren is a New York Times bestselling author with a string of successful titles, including The Compound Effect, Living Your Best Year Ever, and The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster. These books offer practical, proven strategies for jumpstarting your income, achieving big goals, and thriving as an entrepreneur. Darren is also one of the most distinguished keynote speakers in the world today, recognized as a ‘Master of Influence’ by the National Speakers Association (NSA).

Learn more: DarrenHardy.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
Darren Hardy is who we are talking with today. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Compound Effect and The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster. And he is basically going to prepare you for the wild ride of entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship. And this is not a normal part of Darren’s bio, but I wanted to share this because, you know, Darren was making a six figure income when he was 18 years old. He was making over a million dollars a year when he was 24 years old, and by the time he was 27 he was the head of a $50 million business. Darren, you know, statistically, 66% of all small businesses fail, and you kind of sit on on this mission to figure out why. And I know you interview, I mean, you’ve interviewed Tony Robbins and Donald Trump and John Maxwell and Damon John and Maria Shriver. And it’s like, what you do. What have you discovered about what’s causing these small businesses to fail?

Darren Hardy
Yeah, here’s what disturbs me, 90% of working adults are employees, and of those who finally do muster the courage to step out of that herd and start their own business, 66% of them fail. I mean, 66% to me, that is unacceptable. I mean, it doesn’t have to be that way. And really, this statistic is before the onslaught of new entrepreneurs that are coming on board. I mean, over the next several years, millions of people will become entrepreneurs by desperation, because they were laid off and can’t find a job, as corporations continue to find ways to do more with less, or by inspiration since now, being an entrepreneur is cool, which is relatively a new phenomenon, by the way, it wasn’t the case when I first started out. I mean being an entrepreneur meant you weren’t smart enough to get into the right schools or talented enough to get a good job. But the awe inspiring stories coming out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere have rebranded and popularized entrepreneurship now, making it Vogue. And that’s good news. The bad news is that most of these millions of new entrepreneurs are not ready. They are not prepared. They will try and they will fail. And we’re talking about good people, smart people with families who depend on them, with good ideas, market viable ideas, who still with the best of these intentions, will fail, and so I won’t have it. This is why I set out on this personal mission. And so the question I needed to answer is, okay, why? Why do they fail? Discovering the cause of this growth statistic became a personal passion and a personal crusade of mine. And you know, I see these just aren’t millions of businesses that are failing. To me, these are millions of families getting hurt and having their dreams squashed, and so after years of studying and analyzing and coming through all the existing resources, what I found was startling. All the previously reported reasons and assumptions for the cause of failure were incorrect. I mean things like lack of capital or bad location or lack of credit, or inventory mismanagement and pressure from competition, those were not really the main causes of failure. In actuality, the reasons for most failure was not due to outside factors. Instead, they were mainly internal factors. Most often, failure wasn’t caused by economic reasons at all, there were more emotional reasons. Simply put, the entrepreneurs were not ready. They were not prepared emotionally and equipped with the unique skills that are unique to entrepreneurship, that they needed to operate successfully. As entrepreneurs, they could have succeeded if they only knew what to expect in advance, and so you know that that’s really the great problem that is causing people to step finally into entrepreneurship and then fail. They’re just not ready. They’re not equipped.

Host
What do you think is the biggest mistake that most entrepreneurs make when they when they kind of first get started, when they first get out of the gate?

Darren Hardy
Well, I do think that people who are in sales, if you’re if you are independently responsible for generating your income, which means that you’ve got to hunt and kill what you eat. And if you don’t kill, you don’t eat, that makes you an entrepreneur, in my book. And so anybody that is in commission sales is, in fact, an entrepreneur. Quite frankly, everybody in life is an entrepreneur. You are self directed for your life. When you came out of the gate, you could say, if we are going to call the beautiful thing that is the womb of our mother a gate, but as soon as you came out of that gate, you’re on your own in terms of creating and designing the life that you’re ultimately going to lead. That that is the basic definition of an entrepreneur. So now sales, you know the. And when they people first step into entrepreneurship, the mistake that they make is they’re excited, right? A new opportunity, a new frontier, is going to change their life, change their future. And the mistake is they expect everyone around them to be excited for them. And the reality is, is that when you leave, the 90% got to remember, 90% of the people take a paycheck and are just working for their pension. When you leave that herd of the 90% the herd turns on you, simply put, when you stop being like other people, other people stop liking you. And so what happens is, is that people can look at those that appear on the cover of Success magazine or on bluebirds icon show, and go, Oh, well, those people, they went to Harvard, you know, they they had came from the right families, you know, they were lucky, or whatever. It’s easy to excuse themselves when it’s somebody, you know, who’s on the cover of a famous magazine, but when somebody in their own peer group, maybe even somebody within their own family, breaks out from the herd and goes on and becomes an entrepreneur and becomes successful. That eliminates all their excuses. And what happens is, is that even if these people love you and they care for you and they want the best for you, their ego doesn’t, and their ego unconsciously becomes vengeful, and so tactics like innuendo or doubt, ridicule, mockery, sarcasm, scorn, sneering, belittlement, humiliation, jeering, taunting, teasing and dozens of other ways. It’s much easier for them to try to break your spirit and kill your dream than it is to break out from the herd and join and follow you. And so that’s number one. The other thing is, is just they’re just not as courageous as you they they don’t have the same courage to leave the corporate bosom. You know. It goes back to a quote that I love from Gandhi. He said, You know, people will first ignore you, and then they will laugh at you. And then, if you persist further, if you continue to walk away from the herd, now, they will fight you, and ultimately you will win. And if you look at the great people of history, who who have pushed human progress, like Gandhi, like Martin Luther King, like Jesus of Nazareth, like Steve Jobs. I mean, all those that you can point to, they went through that same evolution where first people ignored him. Oh yeah, you said you were going to change your life the last time I remember the last company you joined to the last business that you started, the last diet, yeah. And then when you keep persisting further, you keep going to the gym, you, you, you keep making progress on your business. You, you keep championing this revolutionary idea. Now they start laughing at you and mocking you and sneering and so forth. And then if you actually start becoming successful, and you’re showing up to the family reunion successful. Now they fight you, or the marketplace fights you, or society or culture. Now fights you, but then ultimately you win. And so just those that step out of the herd, they just have to be prepared for that, that journey, and that’s that’s the immersion, the emotional journey that people are going to have to go through to get on the other side of success as an entrepreneur, and quite frankly, success in life. Everybody thinks that successful people are popular. It’s exactly the opposite. The more successful you are, the the fewer people will like you. They might envy you, you know, they might They might even praise you in some cases, but they don’t like you, because you make them feel bad about themselves. Now you don’t do it, but your example of what’s possible, your proof that it can be done, makes them feel bad about themselves. And so it is. It is just one of those things that you have to accept as part of the process. I actually say see it as evidence of progress, because the higher you climb up on the ladder of success, the fewer and fewer people will like you. I remember when I had this epiphany. I was watching the election come down and Barack Obama won by a slight margin, right? It was just barely 50, 51% and I remember, I remember at that moment, I realized why I wasn’t more successful. And the reality was I came to was too many people like me. I mean, if I walk into a room, maybe two, 3% Let’s Go 10, maybe 10% of the people don’t like me. If Barack Obama walks into any room in America, now we’re talking about his own countrymen, any room in America, more than half the people don’t like him. And maybe today, it could be more. But even at the at the night of that election, when he’s waving to the to the crowd with his family and the Chicago Sky and this great celebration that our new president deemed victorious and so forth, still half the people were mad and upset that he won. And that’s arguably the most powerful human being on the planet, and so the higher you climb, the fewer and fewer people will like you. And so just understand that it is part of the process. I mean, how many people didn’t like Steve Jobs? I mean, how many people didn’t like look at it this way, how many people didn’t like Jesus of Nazareth, right? I mean, to the point where they ended up crucifying him. So just know that that’s part of the journey, not crucifixion, of course, and just see it as evidence of progress. I had a friend of mine, and he recently said, I got this terrible article written about our company, and then in the New York Times, I’m like, Dude, you have arrived. You have you have arrived because you know in your heart what you’re doing is good. It’s noble, and it’s for all the right reasons. So it’s not like you’re doing anything immoral. So as long as you know that your mission and your cause is right, no matter what is ever said about you, and if you’re getting the New York Times to write about you, you are shaking things up. You are pushing human progress. Dogs don’t bark at parked cars, right? So if you’re moving is when you stir up the dogs and they start chasing you down, down the down the road, mad as heck, right? So that’s just part of the journey. And you know, part of what you will face is the price of success, essentially.

Host
Now there is another part of that. There’s going to be a lot of people that don’t like you, but also there’s going to be a few that are inspired by you, that you transform, that those are the people who go on the journey with you. And that’s got to be one of the greatest blessings, right?

Darren Hardy
It is, and everybody understands and is delighted by that, right? The thing that they don’t understand is what we just described. They go through a lot of emotional difficulties that the people around them turn on them, and that they are not necessarily as popular as people might assume. But yes, the inspiration you are, the great example, those that you inspire, the letters that you get, the testimonials of your contribution to that them the marketplace or whatever, all those are the wonderful make it all worth it payoffs, but just understand to get to that there’s these other things that, if you didn’t know were coming, could knock you out entirely.

Host
One of the things you talk about is you say that people think they know how to sell, but then they end up doing it wrong. What are they doing wrong? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Darren Hardy
Yeah, I think people learn how to sell through watching Glengarry, Glen Ross or Wall Street or boiler room or the Death of a Salesman. They think that selling is this pushing and prodding and closing and you know, the Jack Benny clothes and the double, triple tie down, all these things that were taught in the 80s, and the way that movies portray salespeople, that’s not accurate. It’s the opposite of accurate, in fact. And I always say, you know, it’s not pushing and prodding, it’s questioning and listening. I mean, really the best example of a great salesperson, I’ll give you an example of what what not to do. So I had a girlfriend way back when, and she calls me in a panic, oh, my god, oh my god. I went to the bathroom this morning and there’s blood on the toilet, and now she wasn’t pregnant or anything like that. And I said, Well, why are you calling me? I faint at the sight of blood. I mean, call, call a nurse practitioner. And so she calls a nurse practitioner, the nurse practitioner, who must have been new to the job, was like, Oh, my God, that sounds terrible. You got to come down to er right away. And she rushes down to ER, and she’s sitting there in a panic, I mean, and she’s crying on the phone, and she’s in the waiting room and so forth. And the doctor walks in, and she’s just in hysterics. And he asked her three or four questions, wrote a couple things down, asked her three or four more questions. Then finally, he asked her, What did you have for dinner last night? And she said, Well, I just, I was in a hurry, so I just boil, boiled a pot of beets. And he said, Honey, you’re going to be fine. You just urinated beet juice. And there’s the difference between, you know, assuming that what everybody wants, you know, you people, people go out there, they think I’ve got this great product. I assume everybody wants it, and they just start pushing themselves. They’re pushing their prognosis or their their prescription on everybody, when in reality, you might have it all wrong you, you might actually be prescribing something to somebody that is is completely inaccurate. And so the best example of how to really be as a salesperson is to be like a doctor. A doctor doesn’t make any assumptions whatsoever. They are going to ask questions. Ask questions narrow down, narrow down, narrow down to the point where they go, Okay, I think I’ve got exactly what it is that you want the relief to that pain, and they give them a prescription, but it was only through a series of really great questions. Another example is, is a lawyer right by process, they can’t make statements when they’re when they are interviewing a witness. They can only go into that process with a yellow pad of questions, and they ask a whole variety of different questions to get the witness to self reveal, and you can’t make the statement for them. You can only have them make it through your questions. And quite frankly, then once they self reveal, you say, I arrest my case, which essentially means, here’s the solution to that. But it was only through the self identification of the Ka. Solitude of questions that brought them to that point. And so it’s the opposite. Instead of pushing and prodding and selling and pitching and presenting, that’s the way most people are taught sales. The opposite is that instead of working on your presentation or your pitch, I say, work on your questions, those questions that help dig out of somebody, their real pains, they’re real problems, they’re real hopes, they’re real desires, they’re real ambitions. And then all you’ve got to do is repeat back to them what they said, that attached to whatever it is that you have, if it truly is the solution to the pain or the desire that they have self identified.

Host
I love it. And, you know, we all think of doctors and lawyers. We go, Oh, these are professional people of high esteem. And we think of salespeople, you know, the profession has kind of one of low you know, it’s kind of low level, or that’s at least the way it’s portrayed in movies. Okay, you talk about Darren, the most difficult challenge that we face. Would you mind sharing with everybody what that is?

Darren Hardy
Yeah, we live in an era of epic distraction. We are overwhelmed by the information and solicitations on our attention that they lose just day in and day out. All these tools that we built for productivity, right? The smartphone, the tablet, the computer, the laptop, the rest of them, all these things that we’ve built to try to make ourselves more productive have advanced far faster than our human capacity to manage ourselves with them. I mean, quite frankly, while we’ve been doing this interview, your phone has probably had an OS update. But in the last 200,000 years, our brain and nervous system has not had a update in that entire period of time, and so technology has outstripped our capacity to manage ourselves. It’s not technology’s fault. Like a lot of people say, Oh, the reason why people are fat and overweight is we have all this low nutrient, long haul food so convenient at our fingertips all the time. No, no, it’s not an overabundance of food that is causing the problem. If food doesn’t just fly out the shelf and into your pie hole, you’ve got to reach out, grab it and stick it into your face, right? So same thing with information overload. It’s not all the information that is the over over abundance of information. It’s the over consumption of information that is causing the overwhelm. So we’re still responsible, you know, we’re still sticking the food in our face, and we’re exposing ourselves to the information overload that that we claim victim to. And so the challenge is, how do you stay focused? Now we’ve always needed to be focused. We need to be focused in the 18th century, the 19th century, the 20th century, we’ve always needed to be focused, but an era of epic distraction, we need to be insanely focused. We have to have rules, rituals, guidelines in order to self manage ourselves, to protect ourselves from ourselves. Quite frankly, with all these incredible, shiny tools, a distraction that we have readily at hand or at fingertip or at lap, constantly trying to solicit our attention, take us off our our track of our goals or the progress we’re trying to make. You know, take us off our agenda. Instead of creating. We spend most of our days reacting. And so that’s the great challenge is, how do you create insane focus and become insanely productive in an era that is just overwhelmed, overwashed with distraction?

Host
Where do you want people to go to, kind of stay in touch with you. Where do you want to have people pointed to?

Darren Hardy
Go to rollercoasterbook.com that’s just rollercoasterbook.com and I promise you it will be worth the amount of money. In Book and audio form, I highly recommend the audio form. Just as those that are listening to this, you get a whole different sense of the heart, soul and feeling of somebody in audio than just reading the reading the printed page. So that’s where to go, rollercoasterbook.com.

Host
Darren, thank you for being here.

Darren Hardy
My pleasure.