Hussein Taleb:
“Hello and welcome to The SuccessGrid Podcast with the role of Hussein Taleb. I am excited to introduce you to a series of conversations with some of the most successful and inspiring individuals from various industries. My aim is to dive into the stories behind their success and explore the knowledge, strategies, habits, mindsets, and wisdom that have propelled their success.
Each episode of The SuccessGrid Podcast will feature a different guest who will share their unique journey, the challenges they faced, and the lessons they have learned along the way. I will also be covering topics from entrepreneurship and innovation to leadership and personal development. Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur, a seasoned business professional, or just someone looking to improve your life, The SuccessGrid Podcast is for you.
My goal is to bring you valuable insights and inspiration that will help you achieve your own success in business and life. So get ready to learn and be inspired. The SuccessGrid Podcast starts now.
In this episode of The SuccessGrid Podcast, I have with me John Cousins, who talks about how to go from a dreamer to a doer. John Cousins is an investor, tech founder, and bestselling author of Understanding Corporate Finance and over 60 other books. John is the founder of MBA ASAP, which provides trainings to individuals and corporations as well.
He was the co-founder of many companies before that was initiated that has IPOs, one of which was successful and others, I guess, were not. So John is here with me to talk about his journeys, how to go from a dreamer to do work, because this is what we want in business and entrepreneurship and in life in general.
So, John, welcome to the podcast.”
John Cousins:
“Oh, thank you, Hussein. It’s a pleasure to be here.”
Hussein Taleb:
“Awesome to have you here with me on this episode. So, generally, when we talk about someone who has written lots of books, started and been into multiple companies, some of them hopefully succeeded and done that, and you initiated the IPOs, and some of them, I guess, maybe failed.
Throughout your years, what is success to you between failures and success? So, how do you see success yourself in business?”
John Cousins:
“Well, success—I always say there’s a great quote by Winston Churchill where he said that, ‘Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.’
I think that’s part of it, that we have to be comfortable with failure. And what is failure really, but just another chance to learn, right? I think that fear of failure is something that holds people back from reaching their potential and actually becoming successful.
So, Thomas Edison also said, ‘I didn’t fail at 10,000 times in trying to figure out how to make a light bulb. I found 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb.’
And a lot of times, it takes that where you try something, and then that may not work, but you learn something from that, and then you build on it, and you keep going forward without losing enthusiasm.
And if you keep trying and trying, then suddenly, you know, after time, you can reach success. And success can be many different things. Certainly, there’s the monetary rewards of success.
And as entrepreneurs, sometimes that initially is the dream. Like, I want to build a company and then sell it and make, you know, a hundred million dollars and then buy a yacht and move away and just never have to work again and all.
And that’s—I don’t think that kind of dream can support or sustain someone through the entire entrepreneurial process. It has to be something that you love. You have to love the journey, not just the destination.”
Hussein Taleb:
“Yeah, very true.”
John Cousins:
“And so I think that’s really important. It’s just really enjoying the day-to-day grind, or whatever, you know, you want to call it, where you’re actually doing the work and have some sort of enjoyment in that.
What I like about what I do now, especially with MBA ASAP—basically it’s business courses. ASAP is short for ‘as soon as possible.’ I boil down everything to the fundamentals so that people can learn it really quickly and grasp these sometimes complicated-seeming concepts and make them simple so that people can understand them and use them quickly.
Especially in things like finance, where it can seem daunting to understand what all those terms mean and all these complicated formulas and mathematics—how do you boil it down to concepts that people can actually understand intuitively and quickly grasp?
And so for me, in that vein, with that company, I’ve had over 30,000, close to 40,000 students around the world in 165 countries. I’ll have to check how many I have in Jordan, but I’ve had students in Jordan.”
Hussein Taleb:
“Yeah, amazing.”
John Cousins:
“And that’s the thing that I like the most, is interacting with people all over the world that have aspirations, that want to make their life better.”
Hussein Taleb:
“Yeah, so you mentioned the grind, the daily grind, the daily issues, and the obstacles that we have on a daily basis as business owners and entrepreneurs. Have you told that to, basically, the new business owner and entrepreneur?
But back in the day when you started yourself, how did you think of these things? Like, did you see failure ahead? Did you think of bad things happening? Or did you think that everything is going to be smooth sailing and successful?
And when you had these kinds of, let’s say, road bumps or roadblocks along your way, what was the most important thing that actually helped you? Is it the mentality that you have, for example, or the people who were around you maybe?”
John Cousins:
“And that’s a great question, Hussein. There’s a great book—I forget the name of the author now—but it’s called The Obstacle Is the Way.
And it became very popular with professional athletes and all. And it’s from a quote by Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor, that ‘The obstacle is not something in your way; it is the way.’
So embracing those obstacles or those impediments to your journey is really where you’re going to learn. So being ready for those obstacles and really diving into them is where you can make your biggest advances and achievements because that’s where you learn.
We learn much more from our failures than we do from our successes. If we’re very successful all the time, we think we’re a genius—and that happened to me. Everything was going great; I thought, ‘Wow, I must be really smart.’
And you don’t learn from what you’ve done. But then when there’s a mistake or a failure, you really question that. You dive into it. What went wrong? What did I do wrong?
And that’s where you really do a lot of learning.
So embracing the obstacles and the failures, I think, are really important.
The other thing is, for entrepreneurs, I bet almost 100% would say: ‘If I knew now what I knew then when I started, and how hard it was going to be, I wouldn’t have started.’
Because it was just way too hard.”
Hussein Taleb:
“Yeah.”
John Cousins:
“So I think being overly optimistic is actually a benefit, because then we start on things. We don’t know how hard it’s going to be, so we start doing things, and then we keep after it.
Because if you know how hard things are going to be in advance, you’d say: ‘That’s too much; I’m not going to do it.’
And so a lot of advances wouldn’t happen if people weren’t blindly optimistic at the front end.
It’s a balance between those two things.
Another thing is, sometimes the obstacle can really be an obstacle. The art is whether you persevere and keep doing the thing and banging through, or do you pivot and do something different because you’ve reached something that is insurmountable.
And that decision of whether to persevere or pivot to do something else is really an art form where you have to rely on your intuition and say: ‘You know, I’m banging my head against the wall here, and it’s really not going to help. I need to do something a little different.’
Or, ‘No, this obstacle is something I can get through, and by getting through it, I’ve really made something important.’
Because if you can transcend something that looks like an obstacle to everyone else, then you’ve made a company that can be successful. That’s your barrier. That’s your moat. That’s your barrier to entry.
You can do something that other people think can’t be done.”
Hussein Taleb:
“Yeah.”
John Cousins:
“You think about Tesla—making electric cars when nobody thought electric cars were possible. Or SpaceX—two Elon Musk companies. And he’s, you know, a questionable figure.
But he took on the rocket industry. NASA and other national enterprises to make rockets and put them into space couldn’t do it. And he did it as a commercial enterprise.”
Hussein Taleb:
“No one thought he could do it.”
John Cousins:
“No one thought he could do it.
So now he has this company that is doing things that no one thought was possible. And those kinds of examples, I think, are really good. But that takes a lot of perseverance and going through the daily grind.”
Hussein Taleb:
“Definitely. But this is a very important topic you touched on here, like the art of form, maybe, right? So the choosing between if we are going through this business, should we keep going to achieve this idea?
Or maybe there is some kind of light—or no light—at the end of the tunnel. Should we change, go to the other road, or should we stay on this path to see what the results are?
Generally, from your experience, are the lights at the end of the road generally there? Or sometimes we need to think and change the path?”
John Cousins:
“Right. That’s why they say, ‘The light at the end of the tunnel may be an oncoming train.’
You never know if it’s going to be the good things, or it’s not.”
John Cousins:
“I can tell you, from my experience—I took two companies public, I was a public company CFO and CEO for 15 years, and I’ve launched about 14 companies. Some of them have been failures, and some of them have been successful.
I didn’t know which ones were going to be. Obviously, I wouldn’t have started something if I thought it was going to fail.
A lot of times, they fail not because of the product, service, or technical kind of problem, but because of problems between founders, problems with employees, problems with investors, or you run out of money. You think it’s going to take this long, and you have this much money, and it turns out you don’t have enough to do it.
There are lots of ways that things can fall apart, but you don’t know that until you start.
But I can say for every company that I’ve done—and even now in the companies that I’m doing—I like to be fluid.
Like Bruce Lee said, ‘Be like water.’ Go around things and be flexible.
Because nothing that I wrote down in my initial ‘here’s what the company is going to be like’ ever ended up like that. It’s always evolving and taking detours and finding out what works and what doesn’t work—and then doubling down on what works.
So the path reveals itself as you move forward. That’s been my experience.
And the path will only reveal itself as you try to move forward and test different things.
Also, doing multiple testing—trying several different things and seeing which ones work—not just single-mindedly saying, ‘This is the way we’re going to do it, and this is the only way.’
And also, listening to customers—that’s key.
Because my experience is I’ll think: ‘This is going to be super popular, and this isn’t going to be popular.’ And it turns out the thing I didn’t think was going to be important—that’s what people like.
And they don’t even think about the thing I thought was the real benefit.
So I think really being open and listening to what the market tells you has been very important to me. Not being too wedded to my ideas, but putting my ideas out there and seeing which ones the market finds valuable.”
Hussein Taleb:
“Yeah, definitely. That’s really important.
So, from your experience now, what did you learn from all the successful companies, for example, or the unsuccessful ones?
And also, at the same time, to try to have a successful business from the start—like you mentioned certain things that are in business that we cannot control sometimes, that happen and affect the business success.
But what are the things that you see in the businesses that succeeded, that for sure should be applied to every business that’s starting and needs to grow?”
John Cousins:
“Yeah, like I said, that’s a key point: to know what’s in your control and what’s not in your control, and to focus on the things that are in your control.
And really to have the wisdom to know the difference between what’s not in your control and what is—so you can focus on things you can actually affect in the world.
What I’ve found in my successful businesses—and even in the unsuccessful ones—is:
• Don’t be afraid to try.
• Really do things.
And then if they don’t succeed in the way that you define success, that’s okay.
But in every case, you should really pull things apart and try to learn lessons from every single step—whether it’s a lesson about how you raise money, a lesson about who you partner with, or a lesson about the type of customers you’re trying to get.
Those are the kinds of lessons.
There’s a lot—whether it’s products, services, or technical hurdles.
• Is it actually a scientific problem where you need to invent something?
• Or is the science known, and now you’re just solving a technical problem?
Look at that upfront: How much effort will it take to get something out?
And then try to find the speediest paths to getting some sort of feedback from the market.
Because you can spend a lot of time building the grandest, greatest thing, and then launch it—and you think everybody’s going to come running to your door to buy it—and then nothing happens.
It’s better to launch something that’s maybe not fully developed.
Reid Hoffman—the guy who invented LinkedIn—he said: ‘If you’re not embarrassed by the product that you’ve launched, you’ve waited too long to launch.’
You really need to do it when it’s still a little rough. If people like it at that level, then you know you’re onto something—and then you can refine it.
Instead of saying: ‘It has to be perfect before I launch it.’
Because the feedback you get will probably be different from what you thought.”
Hussein Taleb:
“Yeah, definitely. That’s very important—the speed of implementation.
Because if we just keep planning without action, we’ll never know the actual results of our business, our product, or our service.
So, John, thank you for sharing these insights. This has been incredibly valuable.”
John Cousins:
“Oh, thank you, Hussein. I really enjoyed this conversation.
If anyone wants to reach out to me, they can go to my website: www.mbaasap.com.
There, I have courses, resources, and a weekly newsletter called Blueprints for Success. I’m also on all the social platforms—Facebook, LinkedIn, X, and TikTok.
And of course, I encourage anyone to connect with me directly.”
Hussein Taleb:
“Thank you so much, John. It was great having you on The SuccessGrid Podcast.
To all the listeners—take action, test your ideas, and iterate. That’s how you grow.
Until next time—take care!