Scott Galloway and Jesse Itzler: Gurus To Lead You Into The New Year

It’s 2020! Even if you don’t have specific resolutions, the New Year becomes a kind of mental reset point. After the holidays and a few days off spending time with family, we return to work with a revitalized sense of purpose and perhaps some new goals. Whatever your goals are, you can always find help along the way. But finding the right help for the moment can be hard, especially with the excess of self-help and improvement books out there.

Be wary of business gurus. Often, they can have a kind of cult following, where people pay thousands of dollars just to be in the same room as them. However, find the right one and they can launch your career or help you make a huge change in your life.

Scott Galloway

Scott Galloway is a professor of marketing at NYU and the author of The Algebra of Happiness. His background is, obviously, in business. He has started a number of successful companies. Galloway frames how you work in business, and your life as an entrepreneur, in a way that looks at individual happiness. While many gurus preach on how to get further than others and pour everything into your life’s work, he talks about being, happy, taking stock, and becoming well rounded.

One of the things Scott Galloway is known best four is pushing back against the old mantra of “follow your passion”. The NYU business school is known for bringing in a lot of successful people to teach, and they nearly always end their speeches with a variation on this classic phrase, which makes Galloway cringe every time. He talks about following talents - the people espousing following a passion are nearly always people who are already successful. It’s an interesting thought, and one worth looking into.

Jesse Itzler

We are taught to value people who think “outside the box”, which is why I love Jesse Itzler. I’m not even sure that he has a box to think outside of. His career is incredibly varied and remarkably successful. He is the co-founder of one of the largest private jet card companies in the world. He’s an author and a rapper. He does 100-mile runs. He’s the owner of an NBA team, the Atlanta Hawks.

Jesse Itzler talks about creating winning habits and routines, to create a winning mindset. He is endlessly practical. Unlike a lot of spiritual gurus that tend to look inwards, he looks outwards towards actions. We are our actions, and Jesse Itzler’s actions have given him a net worth of over $200 million.

There are a number of ways to look into Itzler, but I recommend first giving some YouTube videos a watch, and then picking up his book Living with a SEAL. The book chronicles the 31 days training he completed with the “toughest man on the planet”, but it is about so much more. If you have goals that you want to complete this year in business, look no further than Living with a SEAL.

The New Year

I hope that you are looking forward to the New Year, and in some way the next decade. The start of the year is a wonderful time to reflect, focus, and knuckle down on getting the job done. So if you are needing inspiration, spend an afternoon with Scott Galloway and Jesse Itzler. I guarantee you won’t regret it.