What My Mentor Taught Me 30 Years Ago Changed Everything

There’s this crazy guy named Rehan Allahwala. He’s got 15 million followers on Facebook, and he messaged me saying he wanted to meet in Silicon Valley. I thought he was just another random person hitting me up. I told him I’d be speaking at a conference in San Francisco and to meet me there at 5 PM when I got off stage.

I didn’t even look him up.

Sure enough, when I got off stage, there he was. He had a rental car. We had dinner. He drove me to the airport and told me about his vision.

He asked me, “Do you know how much the average person in Pakistan makes per month?” I didn’t. He told me. Then he said, “If you can offer them employment doing basic digital marketing tasks, I have a million people you can hire.”

I said, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

He said, “Come to Pakistan and I’ll show you.”

So I did. I’ve flown out to Pakistan many times over the last 10 years. Now I can walk anywhere in the country and people know who I am. Not because I’m famous, but because I’ve been working alongside Rehan, who is the super connector there.

The apprenticeship model that built everything

It all started 35 years ago. I had a mentor who was the CEO of American Airlines. He mentored me and opened doors for me. You could say it was like cheating. And I thought, “How do I ever pay this back?”

So I started mentoring others one-on-one. Then I had those people mentor other people. Create a virus, but in a good way.

It’s the model of apprenticeship that has always been around since the beginning of time. If you wanna be a baker, a locksmith, a shoemaker, whatever, you learn by apprenticing from someone who has mastered that skill. After three or four years, you can open your own shop because you learned from someone who has done the thing.

I think that got lost in the American model of the MBA. It’s not that you get a degree. It’s that you have on-the-job experience working with a real practitioner.

In digital marketing, there are a lot of self-proclaimed gurus. And who did they learn from? They paid money for someone’s course. Nothing wrong with courses, but I believe that if you do the thing you say you do and leave a paper trail, it should be documentable. Someone else should be able to follow your recipe and achieve the same result.

Every other profession has certification. Plumbers, lawyers, fitness trainers. They all have to demonstrate they can do a certain set of things. Why not digital marketing? That’s what we want to do, and that’s how we create the million jobs.

Jack Ma’s three stages of life

Jack Ma said there are three stages. In the first decade, you’re a worker gaining skills. In the second decade, you’re a manager running a business. In the third decade, you’re finding ways to leave a legacy and give back.

For me, this is my way of leaving a mark. There are people who have grown $200 million a year businesses from me helping them start from nothing. I’m not doing it for money. I’m doing it because I love hanging out with cool people.

I’m nothing more than a bumblebee pollinating, connecting people on either sides of this planet. I’m a fierce mama bear. I protect my cubs.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the number one barrier

The number one thing that prevents people from succeeding is the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s the world’s largest club that most people don’t even realize they’re members of. People who don’t know anything about a topic but think they know.

The opposite is imposter syndrome, where actual experts feel like they’re not. There’s also HiPPO, the highest paid person’s opinion, where the big boss thinks they know better than the data.

The antidote is checklists. Factually, what is the checklist to get this particular thing done? Learn, do, teach. You learn firsthand following the checklist. You do it multiple times to proven success. Then and only then can you weigh in and provide your opinion.

Everyone has an opinion, just like everyone has a sphincter. But I wanna take advice from people who have done the thing.

I’ve spent over a billion dollars on Google and Facebook ads. I have proof of mistakes I’ve made. The biggest issue isn’t some technical algorithm problem. It’s that humans overestimate their competency.

Follow the recipe, not the guru

People ask me, “Who’s the best at Facebook ads?” That’s the wrong question. Best for what?

If you’re a concrete coating company, the best person is someone who has done it for 200 concrete coating companies.

If you’re a real estate agent, look at the person who has run ads specifically for real estate agents.

Gordon Ramsay shows you exactly how to cook a perfect burger on YouTube for free. I followed his recipe and got an amazing burger. So I’d ask you: follow the recipe. Who has done the thing that you want to do?

Why don’t people talk about the recipe instead of which guru just bought a Lamborghini?

The kid who couldn’t speak English

I didn’t speak English when I was six. I was born in Dayton, Ohio, but my parents didn’t teach me English because they didn’t want me to have a broken accent. So I learned English from the kids at school.

Kids are mean. The first words I learned were not the words you’re supposed to say. I got sent to the principal’s office more times than I can count for things I didn’t even understand.

One time, a teacher handed me back a quiz and I tried to say “thank you.” She thought I used the F word. Sent me to the principal’s office. Her word versus mine.

I said, “You know what? Instead of getting mad, I’m gonna learn English better than all these people.”

I went to the public library every morning before school and every evening after. On weekends, I’d get picked up when the library closed. I read everything. I had no friends, so I spent time with my fictional friends, the books.

One summer, the library had a reading contest. Most kids had four or five books. I had 60. They ran out of space for my stickers.

I represented California in the National Spelling Bee in 1988. Made it to the quarterfinals. I missed the word “cynodont” by one letter. I had it right except for the T.

I learned English better than the average American and took it all the way to becoming a public speaker. It was my way of overcompensating.

Conversations with people who aren’t there

My favorite thing was reading autobiographies. J. Willard Marriott, Ray Kroc, Sam Walton. As I read their stories, I would pretend to have conversations with them.

Reading “Grinding It Out” by Ray Kroc, I would stop and think, “So what made you decide to put cheese on the Filet-O-Fish sandwich?” And I could hear him answering me.

Reading Sam Walton’s “Made in America,” I had this theoretical conversation with him about whether he would have done things differently. By the time he talks about regretting not spending more time with his family, I felt like we already had that conversation.

I’ve had hundreds of these theoretical conversations. But I’ve also had hundreds of real ones. I’ve flown a million miles in first class, and I love asking people, “So why are you in first class?”

Before ChatGPT, I was doing this in my head. Now I just open up ChatGPT and have the same conversations I’ve been having for 40 years.

Everyone has the seed

I don’t think it’s about drive. I think it’s direction. If you give people direction, everyone has the drive.

You take a seed, and if you put it in the right soil, not in the thorns, not in the briars, it’ll grow. I believe we all have the seed.

Find other people who have done what you want to do. Not people selling courses on it. People who’ve done it. Sit down with them. Follow them. Pretty soon you’ll realize they’re just normal people.

I’ve had dinner with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. The first time, I was terrified. But they’re normal people. They forget their keys. They slur words when they’re tired. Steve Wozniak told me personally, “If you saw how things actually were when we started Apple, you would realize this is possible.”

Even Jay Cutler, five-time Mr. Olympia, has hard days. He told my buddy, “Even I didn’t have enough sleep last night.” When you hear that from the guy at the very top, that’s what creates real motivation. Not some motivational speech. A reframing.

Death threats and getting caked

I built an ad network on Facebook in 2007 and wrote the definitive article on how spam works on the platform. It exploded. I became famous. Then came the death threats.

I was speaking at Affiliate Summit, and when I got off stage, someone came up behind me and caked me in the face with white frosting. They recorded it and put it on all the forums. “We caked Dennis Yu.”

I thought, “You know what? I could be like Steve Aoki and laugh it off.” These are just teenagers who don’t realize there are real businesses and real lives at stake.

I got a death threat two days ago from some guy in the UK. You never know if it’s real or AI generated. But I’ve learned to say, “If it’s my time, it’s my time.”

Everything I’ve ever had was given to me. I didn’t deserve it or earn it. The harder I work, the luckier I get.

The real reason Yahoo failed

When it was just engineers at Yahoo, we built stuff. It was a data-driven, prove-it model. We were all in our early 20s, staying until midnight, coding and eating pizza with David Filo, who was at that point the richest man in the world under 40.

Then the managers snuck in. When you become a public company, they want “adult supervision.” They hire HR and all these other people. Pretty soon, my calendar had seven meetings per day. No time to do any work.

I’d go to meetings with 12 people. “Who are you? None of you can write any code.” “I’m a marketing director.” “What does that mean?”

Our ratio of managers to workers went to eight or ten to one. The 4,900 people who weren’t engineers? They were managers. And managers have meetings. That’s what they do.

All the good engineers left. My buddy started WhatsApp and sold it to Facebook for $14 billion. Another friend built a feature Yahoo refused to build, then sold it back to them for $100 million.

I was one of the last engineers to stay. We were the failed entrepreneurs. That was the joke.

What I’d tell my younger self

Focus on partnerships instead of being the know-it-all. I learned a lot from 4,500 books. Part of it was maybe just proving to myself that I could do it. Running marathons, Ironman, all that. But that’s ego.

Imagine how much time I could have saved if I had started by learning how to build relationships. Know who instead of how.

If you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together.

I was scared of other people. I thought they didn’t want to hang around me unless I was optimizing their ad campaigns. Then I realized, 30 years later, there are people who actually care about me. I don’t have to be an achiever to be worthwhile.

Your gift to the world

If you have a gift, you have an obligation to share it. How selfish if you just hoard it and don’t share it with other people.

The successful people I know build relationships in person first, then use digital to maintain them. The people who fail try to meet people online first and then meet them at a conference.

You’re only as good as the people you’re around. Digital is just an amplifier of the things that started in person.

What is your gift to the world?