We’ve all been there, that point of exhaustion that usually comes around 3:30 in in the afternoon or 8:30 at night when your computer is freezing, excel wont save and you’re about to quit your job; Its a nightmare. And in these moments of self doubt, some of us (myself  included) have turned to the magical, slightly disgusting, elixir that is 5-hour energy. From the days of yore, when i was trying to crank out that 30 page midterm to the night before, to the days of…..today, when I’m trying to crank out those 60 page project reports (which, when i put it like that is kind of depressing), these little bottles of  “oomph” have gotten me trough some rough times.

So imagine my pleasure when the founder of 5-Hour Enegery, Manoj Bhargava, was on one of my favorite podcasts, NPR’s “How I Built This”. Now, I think that you should all listen to the whole thing, it’s extremely interesting, but there were a few snippets that I found to be great.

1. On Business: Making a company profitable is all about common sense – focusing on what costs money and what make money. Ask the questions about why things cost what they do through fresh eyes and determine where waste is. As he said “If you use common sense, you’re in great shape, if you use experts then you’re in trouble.”
2. On experts: The overarching theme that came across was that “Experts are useless”. They have preconceived notions about what you need and what you can and cannot do; they tell you what NOT to do, but have no idea about what TO DO. he made and interesting point that most of the truly great inventions were made by non-expert outsiders who had a different perspective.
3. On branding: Bhargava maintains that you have “less than half a second” to convince a consumer to buy your product. So keep it simple stupid.
4. On Entrepreneurship: It’s all about failure and determination. According to Bhargava, you have to have three things to succeed as an entrepreneur,  “Use your common sense. You have to be totally determined. You need a sense of urgency; do it now, don’t delay”. This stuff seems pretty straightforward, but how many times have we pushed that idea off to the future because we didn’t know how to do it or said we could do it later? Even as someone who studies company operations AS MY ACTUAL JOB, I get bogged down in the minutia of whether or not I know enough to start – when really you can just start, make rational common sense operational decisions and it’ll probably work out. Or it won’t – at which point the advice about failure comes into play.

All in all, this was a great talk, one of my favorite episodes. Listen to the whole thing below.

https://www.npr.org/player/embed/519514841/519712175