FailTime: Failing Towards Success

jet okay we're good so this talk is not email fit it's not fail item it's called fail time or failing towards success and in a lot of the talks like this you're going to see this probably a little bit different than the normal talk certainly different than one and video fail let's try again we've got to have a failure during a fail talk that's kind of the way it works um i wasn't planning on putting any kind of quotes up here about failure and success because everyone does that seeing a tech talk um we're going to get beyond the motivational quotes we're just going to dig into the things that really matter and ultimately it comes down to why this

talk well why not most contacts talk about successes all the great things they did they exploited this this thing over here pop calculator most cons talk about the successes and celebrate the successes this is not that talk failures happen all the time mistakes are made and sometimes we go ahead and do something that doesn't make sense because we're told to and we fail because institutionally we have to we follow directions that don't make sense we do what we're asked to do like put a picture that's on this usb drive on my cake right so sean why how did you just what are you doing here well the idea of talk on failure started with my talk at walmart spark con

conference about a year ago and during the usual post-talk q a i got asked about active directory stuff which is great i love talking about it and someone said have you ever failed at any of this i'm like are you kidding me all the time all the time but that's that just gave me that idea of people only see your successes they see you as this person that does great things in this area and a lot of times people don't want to talk about the things that didn't go right the problems they had the things that went wrong how they got to that point and this idea was resparked so to speak when i was talking about the concept of

failure at derby con with waxwing while i was manning the tri-mark booth so here we are this is not a real agenda so chalk this up as a failure of expectation you expected something that outlines this journey yes there'll be a personal anecdote i'll talk about some technical failures of mine how to be better failure is part of success and yes we will have to close out with some motivational quotes i will put the slides up on addsecurity.org i know that doesn't make sense but that's what i have and i forgot to do that so i'll save that for later so about me my name is sean metcalf i'm founder of tri-mark security company we

have a booth out there come say hi a microsoft certified uh master in active directory one about a hundred in the world most of them work for microsoft though i've spoken at a number of conferences i'm very happy to say that first time i ever spoke on stage at a conference was a besides charm the first besides charm so i'm very happy to be back here on stage talking to you about failure which doesn't make sense in that context but i'm a security researcher consultant and i own and operate 80security.org which who's heard of that okay cool for those who haven't heard of it please check it out it's it's pretty great you don't have to listen to me jessica

mentioned it earlier so all right so this is where normally the talk would pivot and talk about here's what we did we pivot we based on this we did this we did that again this is a different type of talk so we're going to start by highlighting my failures in my about slide i dropped out of college without graduating i despite the fact that i successfully attended a community college for two years and i went to a four-year university i was a microsoft mvp for a single year and not renewed i've had talks rejected at smokon shakka khan and black hat and i restarted 80security.org after a failed attempt at blogging a long time ago so i guess the real

question is why are you here mean this is a talk about failure uh hopefully not everyone's here to see me fail on stage that would be kind of awkward but if it happens it happens so i'll just say it was part of the talk so we'll go with that but ultimately the wise master yoda says the greatest teacher failure is and it's true so one of my favorite hobbies is photography and i started photography in high school as many people did with something that looked like this that you'd something called like this called film and the crazy thing about film is you just couldn't take pictures all day long go click click click click click etc you had 24 to 36

exposures depending on that film canister and so you have to be very careful and deliberate of the pictures you took and you had to ensure that you had the right exposure setting the right shutter speed and make sure everything was perfect for that picture otherwise it wouldn't turn out right so i learned about photography my thought for my father was very into photos loved taking pictures and so when my mother was pregnant with me he of course took his camera and took pictures and so we take a deliberate picture of this deliberate picture of when i was born in the hospital and later on with my mother holding me and then once i was brought home

and eventually my mom goes hey jim i'd love to see those photos and he says absolutely and she's like yeah and they better be good because you said no to the wedding the photographer at the hospital that came in to take a picture of me and sean so yeah i want to see these it'll be really good and so he said great i'll get them for you and here they are there are no baby photos of me when my mom was pregnant with me when i was born and a little time thereafter why well back then when you had the film you had to load the camera my father forgot to load the camera so quite an epic fail

they did make up they got through that i'm still here um but i learned a lot from that i learned from his mistakes with cameras and photography now i use digital i back up my photos everywhere i have two memory cards in the camera it writes to both of those cards i take it out i copy it to my computer it cloud backups it goes over here i've got photos all over the place because i don't want to be in a situation where those photos are gone so let's talk a little bit about my journey some other failures and major risks that i took i got an f in european history because i didn't understand that the

tests were entirely based on what the instructor wrote on the whiteboard or the blackboard i didn't realize i had to write down everything that he wrote up there and that nothing that was covered by the test was actually in the book i failed to understand what was actually being tested and why and then the next test came around i was like all right i'll take some notes but i didn't write down everything that was on the board and i failed the test again i failed to understand what the point of it is which again right now i kind of fail to understand the point of it but i realized that i learned how to take better notes because

i was not doing what i was supposed to i was not hitting the level hitting the mark that i should have been i interviewed with emc twice and i was not hired honestly i would not have hired me back then i had the first interview i failed the interview i said hey can you give me another chance i can really do this i could work for you guys like emc this would be cool right they gave me a phone interview like no sorry you're not good enough and i wasn't and i learned from that i learned it from the questions they asked what they were looking for and it wasn't a good fit i wasted a lot of time on useless stuff

such as arguing on audio visual forums building my own imdb inventory of dvds using microsoft access yes i'm an extreme nerd i've taken measured risks i left a company of a hundred thousand employees to join one with less than 10 and then to see that company grow to 250 and eventually gets sold i paid over ten thousand dollars to go after an elite certification the mcm started my own company and then with that company i developed a service offering that is very much like what microsoft does except we take it from a different perspective that's a risk people ask all the time how are you different than microsoft come by our booth i'll tell you

so albert einstein is one of the greatest minds in history and he said that failure is success in progress for him failure was a very perfect component in how to get to success he recognized that you're going to make mistakes you're going to learn from these mistakes albert had plenty of mistakes he couldn't speak fluently until he was nine he was expelled from school because he was rebellious and didn't like what was going on he was denied admittance to a technical institute and he split the atom trying to make beer okay the last ones i got from this documentary called young einstein so i think it's accurate moving on so katie masuris great person you should follow her if you're not

she pointed out that quantum magazine had this article on einstein being on the verge of finishing a theory that would replace newtonian gravity i mean epic right except he made a critical last-second error that had him doubting himself one of the greatest minds in history was doubting himself he's like this isn't working i can't do this but ultimately you want to keep going you can do great things you're going to make mistakes along the way if you haven't noticed this is not your typical contact i love this chart i've seen it on the internet in multiple places we go from being a beginner i know nothing phase to what's referred as the hazard phase i'm an expert in this area

eventually we move to the section or the level at which we are an expert because other people tell us we are but realistically if you ask us we'll say yeah i know a bunch of stuff about this but i really know nothing because there's so much that i could know about so again in these kind of talks if i was up on the ted stage i would probably put up some definitions so let's do that that looks good it's a failure talk we should probably define that right a lack of success the omission of expected to require action now this is a fun joke you know i could throw up success also um but one thing found out i've

discovered when i was going through this and making these jokes is that the original definition of success was specified as achieving or failing to achieve its aims right there look it up so at one point success was defined by also failing to do something which is a really interesting thing to to recognize or understand and so i was thinking what else don't i understand properly or appropriately that maybe i've been missing this guy said inconceivable every time he was like that's impossible there's no way you could do that so guess what sean did sean looked up the definition of inconceivable it actually is not far off than how he was using it in the movie

of course the problem is he's using it as hyperbole he's saying it all the time which means that a certain point once all these inconceivable things happen you probably should recognize that maybe they will so there's anonymous poet that i found wrote i still mess up but i'll start again i keep falling down i keep on hitting the ground i always get up now to see what's next birds just don't fly they fall down and get up i want to try even though i could fail if only we could know who this anonymous person is because this is oh that's right shakira try everything and where did we find this from zootopia exactly thank you to the person in the

second row with the kids who has probably heard that song way more than he ever needed to and so the key behind this is obviously you want to keep going you're going to make those mistakes i think it's a great message for kids if you think about kids they mess up all the time they're constantly testing boundaries what do they do when they learn how to walk they fall down all the time and parents run over and pick them up you know they have to learn these things they're going to learn they're going to fall down and get back up again which is a great song for kids and adults and tara another great person to follow

on twitter if you aren't being rejected more than accept you're not asking for enough if you're winning constantly you're in a rut i thought this is great and i also found a quote by jk rowling who said something very similar it is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all in which case you failed by default you were a failure at not at failing and so jk of course had a short unhappy marriage after that she was a single mother who no job living on welfare sank into the depths of depression found healing and writing and she wrote star wars actually sorry it was twilight

sorry jk just kidding jk so mental barriers this is an interesting thing that a lot of people don't realize they have these are the things that are preventing you from doing something that you might want to do but you go i can't do that or maybe you've had people in your life that said no you can't do that or you need to do this or you need to go down this path you need to go to high school you know you need to go to college you need to go get a graduate degree then you go and you do this academic thing because that's what everyone else in your family has done right we have mental barriers all the

time we look at something we say there's it's not possible for me to go there because there's an entire wall and a gate on the top and some other gate there and i just can't get there i can't do it and so many people when they look at a wall they go well see i guess i'll just keep walking until i find a way around it other people look at this wall and go i see handholds and footholds and i think i could just climb over it and we could just go where we want to go and so the thing about failure is it's it's more than just the attempting to do something trying to do something it happens all

the time and one of the things that i really enjoyed in jessica's keynote this morning was talking about questions when someone asks a question you don't understand the question it might not be because they're dumb it might be that you're just missing what they're asking and so i always go hmm that's a good question i wonder what you're asking because the the way that i see it is that when asking a question there are words in that question that somebody's asking there's my interpretation of what that question is and then somewhere in the middle is what's actually being asked someone may ask you how do i do this they don't necessarily want to know how to do that specifically

or they say i need to implement x which to me sounds like a solution but ultimately the thing that i'm not gaining or gathering from them is what is the problem they're trying to solve i might tell them how they can deploy that solution but if that solution solution does nothing for them and doesn't solve the actual problem we have not helped at all so as professionals we want to make sure that when someone asks a question we fully understand what they're asking it's okay to ask for clarification it doesn't make you look dumb it's just a way to get more insight and more understanding of what that person is trying to communicate with you

so walt disney said the difference in winning and losing is most office not quitting which is a great quote this is from a guy who dropped out of school to join the army and the army said no we're not taking you before starting disney he had laughagram which went bankrupt due to his inability to run a successful business yeah walt disney and he was fired from a missouri newspaper for not being creative enough really that's pretty incredible walt disney i'm pretty sure everyone here has heard of disney especially since we were talking about shakira and zootopia there's a book that i really like and graduates tend to be given this as a present called oh the places you'll go

and it talks about you'll do good things you'll do bad things it'll be this it'll be that it's kind of an interesting microcosm of life about the challenges and things that you'll go through but one of my favorite parts of this book is about a place called the waiting place waiting for a train to go or a bus to come or a plane to go or the mail to come or the rain to go or the phone to ring or the snow to snow or waiting around for a yes or no waiting for their hair to grow everyone is just waiting waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for the wind to fly a kite or waiting around for friday

night or waiting perhaps for their uncle jake or a pot to boil or a better break or a string of pearls or a pair of pants or a wig with curls or another chance everyone is just waiting waiting and then it goes on and says no but that won't be you you're going to move on for the waiting place so many people that i know have just been waiting what do i mean by this i mean waiting for something to happen waiting for something to happen in their life waiting for a promotion waiting for their boss to recognize them waiting for the opportunity to work on a cool project that they want to work on

waiting for something to happen you can make that change you can instead of waiting go i volunteer to work on that project that sounds really great or tell your boss and say you know what i know it's not required but i'm just going to send you a list of things that i do every week and here's what i've worked on and here's what you know i did and was able to get done volunteer that information because it will help you to stop waiting and actually actualize the things that you want to do so you see the elephant you know what i'm talking about what am i going to say how do you drink wine with an elephant

in a top hat right no how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time which reminds me of a book by dr leo called baby steps and it's about how to live life one step at a time and dr leo helped a guy named bob get out of his office get onto the elevator walk down the street and get on the bus how do you do this because he told bob don't think about the bus and where you're going think about the steps that it takes to get to the door in this office and then from there to the elevator and then the next step and then bob figured it out and he did

great and they made a movie called what about bob it was fun but for a lot of people what they're doing and where they're headed seems like this big expanse of desert just looming over them something that they just couldn't possibly get to the end of and it's challenging it's something like just i can't do this it's too far it's too much others look at this and go all right what's on the other side of that desert there's i'm working towards something there's something important that i want to get to maybe it's a beautiful beach and i walk through all this sand i get to that beautiful beach and i can relax and lounge on the on the on the sand

swim in the in the ocean and really enjoy it and make milestones make points along the way that says okay i'm going to reward myself as i go through each of these parts when i was going through and taking microsoft tests to get certified as a microsoft mcse mcm all those what i did was i said i will reward myself every time i pass a test i'll go get ice cream and then when i finish the whole thing and get the certification i'll do something a little bit bigger right because then i had something to look forward to and it wasn't such a chore at that point because i was thinking also about that fun thing that

i would be doing later so curling harlan sanders says one has to remember that every failure can be a stepping stone to something better something greater and this from a man who founded a number of various businesses which all failed he didn't begin kentucky fried chicken until he's 65 years old and his recipe was rejected a thousand times before accepted and before calling a kentucky fried chicken it was called big bucket o chicken all right maybe maybe not so let's talk about some of my failures if you try to fail and succeed which have you done i have done many things so i'm going to talk about a few different case studies of things that i've failed out

technically that i've worked on that i thought would go a different way fixing permissions so i was working as this organization and i was new so i was like i'm gonna make this great i'm gonna do wonderful things it's gonna be fantastic and i tell my boss you know what boss boss you need a better name so joe boss it's nice knowing you i'm going to fix these permissions on these shares so i took a saturday i went in and i used this wonderful tool called icackles and i'm like i'm going to do this and i sat down i started typing out the commands manually first mistake and i ran it through all the shares

and proceeded to lock myself out of everything this was a wonderful saturday much like today where the sun was shining the birds were singing and i'm sitting inside the data center banging my head against the computer because i locked everything out i changed permissions i shouldn't have i had no backup i had no backup plan and i did not pre-write the commands that i had typed and like a dummy i typed cls at some point so i had no idea what i'd run yes so much much much much much later that night i was able to revert all my changes and i finally left it something like two or three in the morning the next day

so i have this slide up there for people looking at this later but final result failed so let's talk about something more interesting or or better detecting golden tickets so the first time i got on the stage i talked about how to detect golden tickets and why that was a great thing because now defenders could actually know if someone was using detect golden tickets in their environment and skip and skip duck wall and benjamin delphi at black hat 2014 presented on kerberos golden tickets how you could use mini cats to actually create and forge a ticket that gave you access to everything in the network in the environment now of course you need to have admin rights initially but

in doing this you could basically write your ticket to whatever you want and a few months later certain eu came out with a white paper saying definitively there is no clear indication of such attack in windows logs i decided not to listen to them why because i was thinking there's got to be a way maybe they didn't look at something maybe i could figure it out so what i did was i started thinking about how that might work here's benjamin delphi working in his home office on his computer banging against kerberos with skip on twitter dm or a skype call or whatever trying to figure this out and on the other side we have the microsoft developers someone

from kerberos someone from the operating system someone from network someone from the event log condition configuration sitting in a room whiteboarding out and setting up the specs making sure it lines up and things get logged correctly so my hypothesis was maybe maybe ben missed something so i had to figure out what the anomalies were what was something that didn't look right what was something that just didn't fit maybe they labeled something that was different than how microsoft labeled it maybe there was something that just wasn't there that should have been there or something that shouldn't have been there that was maybe there was something that was just so obvious that everyone had missed it or maybe just maybe they had

done it their way because they found that that's the way that worked ah cinnamon so i looked at the event logs after running through the attack in my lab and i looked at it and i stared at these for quite a while and i'm like yeah there's nothing here it all looks normal i don't see anything that's missing anything that's obviously different um yeah i use star wars characters in my in my labs so darth vader would normal in this situation maybe not in your network but when i put them together and compare them side by side i said wait a second something is obviously different and obviously wrong here and that's how i figured it out and i

was able to figure this out because i started looking at things and comparing them making a baseline of what normal is and making it and then looking at what was different you can do the very same thing on your network in fact what you should do is baseline normal in order to best understand what's different anomalous and again this is for uh people later on they're looking at slides success i figured it out but at first i didn't i missed it i spent several days looking at this and i was like well maybe sir to use right and i went did something else and i'm like no there's got to be something there and i went back to it another failure

case study of mine microsoft mvp status when mvp means making vacation plans so two years ago around this time i tweeted out i'm excited to announce that i'm now a microsoft mvp that's great i was excited get some cool benefits get to be part of the club right let's be invited out to redmond to go to their super secret meetings just kidding there are none and then about 16 months or 14 months later i got an email that started out in reviewing your impact i'm sorry to inform you now anyone who reads emails knows this is never going to be a good email so after that i'm like wow this this is not feeling so great

okay so i went to twitter and i was like hey guys just so you know i was really excited i'm not a mvp anymore so you can take me off those lists i guess just learned i'm no longer in microsoft mvp last year i was the first a first-time mvp and i'll miss that community but i'll still keep sharing things because i enjoy what i do and the response and the reaction to this was really pretty great i started getting responses that were just like very heartwarming very real

very touching and people all across the community were like hey you're doing good things don't worry about it don't worry about what microsoft thinks we think you're good we think you're great your mom probably thinks you're always an mvp mvp's titles don't matter still an mvp titles don't make the man and that was really great and then probably the icing on the cake was when jessica talked me into submitting to microsoft blue hat last year late which was in november and i was accepted to speak about act directory security and so i talked to microsoft about the problems i see and things that should be fixed and in front of an audience mostly of microsoftics

i proceeded to live edit my about slide which was fun and at this point i can laugh about it because you know what it's not a big deal i do what i do because i love it i enjoy it it's challenging for me and then rally sex said hey guess what sean you're a rally second vp so thank you rallysec for keeping the mvp dream alive

so again final result i'm not really sure what the final result is here but i'm okay with it failed research topics so i've done a number of posts on 80security.org and a number of posts and presentations about things that i've looked at and found out well there's a number of these that never made it to the blog because they just didn't work the way i thought they would one was removing kerberos rc4 encryption to stop attacks there's so many rc4 attacks in kerberos kerber roasting initially golden tickets and forage tickets but now they use aes for so that doesn't really help but there's a number of them and i started writing a blog post like i

normally do i start it with the information about what's behind it i write a few paragraphs to provide the foundation of the information that's there and then i go dig into what i'm talking about i was so certain that this was going to work i started writing the blog post in fact i really went into detail about what this was i wasted a lot of time writing this blog post and it never got to where i thought it would be now i'm going to go back and test this again with 2016 and windows 10 but it'll probably be the same result but that's okay because i'll learn something from it i know what works and

what doesn't so when a customer goes and says hey i can just remove rc4 right like well i tested that out doesn't seem to work that way and that's something that i've learned that's something that's helpful the other one i looked at was an attack using the land turtle attack which was this hack five device called land turtle plugs into the usb drive it has a nick on it and rob fuller aka mubix came out with this attack where he realized that if you put this little land turtle device or usb armory which is just a little computer on a usb stick if you plug it in basically it spoofs that nick and by using dhcp and

responder you start getting credentials for the pers ntlm credentials for the person that's logged in and locked on that system and i'm like well i can block this there's got to be a way to block this right i'm going to do this and i started writing all this great stuff about how it works and how i'm going to block it and all this other things i did figure out how to block it but nobody here has read that blog post why because it's not effective there's a device id for a lan turtle there's a device id for a usb armory device because when you plug in the usb device it goes i'm this device id here's why

that doesn't work usb is packet based and the device is telling the computer information about itself when does that ever work right so i had a gpo that would block that device id and stop it from working but all you have to do is modify the configuration information in that usb device so it's a different device id now a microsoft keyboard i'm allowed right i did i was successful at one point though i did successfully break my laptop by blocking all the usb devices which i don't recommend you do and i had to do a full restore and recovery on it which is why i don't use my own production laptop anymore for that kind of testing

so i failed on that but i learned a lot from it so michael jordan said i've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why i succeed michael jordan one of the greatest basketball players ever was cut from his high school basketball team he tracks his own failures he knows he's missed more than 9 000 shots he's lost almost 300 games and that michael jordan himself will tell you he has missed the game-winning shot 26 times wow and then he led earth's team to beat aliens in a championship basketball game so i mean the guy is amazing by the way if you haven't seen the documentary space jam i highly recommend it

but ultimately mental state matters barney stinson from how i met your mother said when i get sad i stop being sad and be awesome instead true story right so i have this rule where something happens i get upset by it i give myself 24 hours i can be upset about i can do whatever i want just be frustrated withdraw a day later i start figuring out and problem solving but ultimately depression is no joke get professional help thankfully the rock has helped me write these slides because he came out recently and talked about challenges and and difficulties with depression in his life and he said that one of the most important things you can realize is

you're not alone your friends and family reach out and the rock at 23 years old was cut from the canada football league yes they have a football league this is the rock that got cut from the canada football league at 23. seven dollars in his pocket he had to move back in with his parents he got very depressed got very sad about this so for him failure is something that he embraces he pushes forward with that he recognizes it doesn't work for everybody but it works for him and he's been very successful in doing so and again thank thanks the rock and under armour they put together a campaign about talking about failure and using it to get better

my personal philosophy always making my past failures inform my current actions and the rock has been one of the most successful people well you know of our time you might say wrestling's fake but not everyone gets to get these titles this many times and hulk hogan certainly has not said of anyone else that he's the biggest superstar in the business the guy has been on forbes top 100 most powerful celebrities he's been at number 25 and since then he's been in the top 20. so just because things aren't working out out now doesn't mean things won't work out later sam jackson great actor right he really gets successful until he's like in his 50s it takes time sometimes it doesn't work

the way it you wanted to at this point in time there might be a reason for that it might not be your time now but it might be later so there's a book that i love called the charisma myth and basically it talks about mental state being everything you start with the mental state of i can do this and even i will do this when i look and try to figure out gold and ticket detection i started with the thinking of there's got to be a way to detect this there has to be something that is different about the way that this attack gets logged i was successful on that i wasn't in other things but i started with that

and positivity breeds positive results one of the things that i like to do when i'm not feeling so hot are so great stand up straight roll back my shoulders take five deep breaths and go i can do this it helps a lot so infosec failure story time i reached out to some friends who gave me some stories and i picked a couple of them that i'm gonna share with you one of them said years ago i wrote my first snort signature probably my 10th looking for content powershell that's it any port any protocol etc for all our network devices in the world nearly brought down our back end for processing these hits about half a

million hits in 15 minutes and they set up new qa processes for him but it opened his eyes to a completely different way for looking at host-based detectives indicators over the wire and he went on to write nearly 150 snort signatures over the next several months based entirely on that who is this person daniel bohannon who has been the person the name in powershell obfuscation he has learned from his mistakes and he pushes forward because of them some would say despite them so i talked to some pentesters and they said ir poisoned the 24 i was in which happened to be where all the i.t staff worked i dost them all they couldn't work for three hours

i locked an entire domain out when i didn't fully understand how lockout observation window operated affected 2500 users use hash dump on a dc from interpreter blue screen the dc which was the pdc emulator caused a little bit of problems there so these are a few different people i'm not going to name them but in conclusion you can't completely fail at something if you never stop trying right and there's a movie i watched recently which had a quote in it which didn't really seem to fit the movie that i was watching but i thought it was pretty good and the quote was if you want to make the world a better place take a look at yourself and make a

change who um michael jackson said that quote but actually it was batman ultimately we have the power and the ability to change who we are and what we're doing or where we are in this point in time we can leverage our failure to push forward with what we're doing it's okay to fail silicon valley has a saying called fail fast venture capitalists usually will not fund a new company in silicon valley unless the founders have already failed at a couple of other companies first why is that why wouldn't they do that why would they hire the person or why would they put millions of dollars into a company that has failed the guy behind it has failed

why would we do that because they've learned from it they said okay well we're going to go into this business that didn't work we're going to pivot we're going to do this now we're going to do cyber security so give me all your money so katie masuris again said never believe anyone who doesn't believe in you reject their reality and substitute your own give everything you have to whatever you set your mind to you can climb the unclimbable when you look back you'll reflect on how well you accepted the opportunities in front of you and acted upon them i love this because so often we go to a friend and we say hey i'm going to go do this and they're

like that's a really dumb idea and we go okay i guess it's done right why why do we do that why when we're so excited about something do we tell someone else about it and we accept them saying no that's stupid why would you ever do that right i'm going to start a company where we're not actually going to have any cars we're not going to hire anybody but we're going to have people drive around cars and pick them up and deliver them places right oh that's a dumb idea we already have that it's called taxis i'm going to start a company where i'm going to rent out other people's places i've never met them in my life

to other strangers who i've never known but i'm going to connect them and i'm going to call it airbnb people are like that's dumb why would you ever want to do that that can't be something that's going to be a good idea but they persisted they kept moving despite the negative feedback they said this is a great idea i know it is i'm going to try it and if i fail i will have learned something so robert schuller has a few quotes that i'm going to share with you and these are some of my favorites and these are things that i really internalize what goals would you be setting for yourself if you knew you could not fail

it's a very interesting effect on your psychology i'm i love psychology i read a lot of things about how psychology works the psychology of selling psychology of people ultimately we don't do something because we have fear we have fear of failure right what would happen if we couldn't fail in that endeavor how would we handle things differently how would we move forward what would be our choices so if you couldn't fail at it what would you be doing differently now or if you could fail in a way that where you were completely safe where failure doesn't mean anything there's no negative results of that failure you'd be much more inclined to do that right so

what i try to do is look at it and go okay what's the worst possible thing that could happen and then i walk back from that and inevitably i get back to something that's not so bad building on that what dreams would you have on the drawing board if you had unlimited financial resources i worked with a realtor to look at houses and he took me to several houses one day and he goes okay sean if somebody gave you one of these houses which one would you take because he was asking me about questions about it i was like i don't know i don't know i like this one i like that one i was being very wishy-washy

he said but if i gave you this house which one you take and i said none of them because none of them really fit none of them are really what i would want what i what i would want to get it's not me and what he did is he took the financial component out of it and now i can make decisions without that being something that was in my mind something that was holding me down from actually looking at things that really matter ultimately financial stuff does matter but to a different extent i worked with a guy who had this saying where he said okay but for five dollars more if you could have this on your network would that be

something you would want to do five dollars right changes the whole dynamic because someone will go well i can't do that that's too expensive what jessica talked about this morning in the keynote which i really love and which i i preach all the time is you have a lot of tools in your utility kit and your utility bill right you can use these you can use all of these for utilities in order to lock things down and make them better to protect the environment without having to spend a lot of money sure there's going to be some things you're going to spend money on but a lot of things that are the most impactful are things like the windows

firewall that are free just takes your time to figure out and there's resources on the internet to help with that what plans would you be making if you had 30 years to carry them out again taking time out of this consideration out of this conversation i'm too old i can't do that all this stuff's already been figured out i'm coming out of college i just got my degree everyone's already done all the cool stuff absolutely not one word for you if you're graduating college or high school and you're concerned about all the cool stuff has already been done cloud nobody knows what it is everybody wants to use it become a cloud expert and own the next 10 years of your life

so i love these three because they each take one major factor out of it fear of failure financial concerns time those are the three factors that often weigh down on how we decide things how we think about things but my favorite quote and the one that i pretty much live by these days is a year from now you'll be a year older what are you going to do ramit says he said this and i use this because i'm like absolutely as you get older time goes faster when you're five it seems like it's going to be forever until i finish my dinner and i get my cookie right when you're 12 it's like it's forever until i'm gonna get to go to the

mall and buy that thing i want to buy time speeds up in another year there's going to be another besides charm what is it that you want to achieve don't let the fear of failure hold you back thank you very much that's been my time thank you for yours