Justin Lafazan – Entrepreneur; Author of What Wakes You Up; Founder of the Next Gen Summit, an environment for young entrepreneurs to connect, collaborate and inspire; TEDx Speaker; the importance of surrounding yourself with the high achievers

Segment 1: (Length :03:00) – General Updates; Introduction to Justin Lafazan

“I think I wanted to be an entrepreneur way before I started a company. I was always just a little bit of a rebel in school. I was a good student, but I never really fit in.“

“You don’t need to start with something huge. You don’t need to gather this huge investment. Just start, see where you can go and then figure it out from there.”

 

Segment 2: (Length :05:00) – Talking with Justin; Balancing Studies with Running Companies; Next Gen Summit;

“I made a lot of mistakes. I made the classic mistakes that every entrepreneur after they started a company, would say they make.”

“How can we bring together the most badass young people across the entire world? Not just entrepreneurs, but inventors, scientists, actresses, musicians. Just the coolest young people that we could find around the world to bring together and help each other.”

“How can we get from where we are to where we want to be both personally and professionally. It’s all based on helping each other get there. Learning from each others’ mistakes, providing introductions, educating and inspiring and sharing the resources we all gathered.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2015/12/29/5-cant-miss-conferences-for-entrepreneurs-in-2016/

Segment 3: (Length :04:00) – Talking with Justin; The Collaboration Generation – Millennials & Entrepreneurship.

“Older generations have a competitive mindset. Everyone is a competitor. However, at the Next Gen Summit, people have a very collaborative mindset . . . Everyone wants to help each other because they realize that long term, the more you collaborate and cooperate the better off you’ll be in your personal and professional life.”

“Young people more than ever are realizing that this is the age of collaboration. Not the age of competitiveness. People at the Next Gen Summit are coming to give; they are coming to give naturally; give their introductions and education.”

“If you’re creating something new and delivering new value to a customer audience, then you’re absolutely an entrepreneurs.”

 

Segment 4: (Length :03:00) – What Success Means; the Givers; Networking for Relationships Sake; New Entrepreneurship and the Art of the New Hustle

“If anything I learned in entrepreneurship, its that you have to stop networking for the sake of networking and start networking for the sake of people you’d actually be friends with.”

“The latest entrepreneur mentality was that you had to leave your job or school to become an entrepreneur. But today’s version of an entrepreneur can run a startup and be in school or have a job so long as you are willing to hustle and make it work. That mentality is allowing more and more young people to get involved in startups.”

“You don’t have to take a huge risk to start a company.”

“More and more entrepreneurs want to embrace the journey because it’s finally acceptable to fail. Now failure is so sexy.”

Segment 5: (Length :03:00) – Justin Lafazan’s book, What Wakes You Up; Positioning Yourself Around High Achievers

“Young people can find and do work that they love, and a lot of it involves failing early, failing often, experimenting, getting your feet wet, finding mentors.”

“I’m a firm believer that if you surround yourself with people who’ve achieved what you want to achieve, they’ll show you how to do it.”

“Surround yourself with people who’ve achieved what you want to achieve so you can reverse engineer it. Surround yourself with hustlers and people doing cool things and projects and it will rub off on you eventually too.”

Segment 6: (Length :03:00) – Hustler Thought of the Day:

Once you free yourself from perfect acceptance, it’s easier to launch work that matters. – Seth Godin

What this means to Justin:

“A lot of times parents or colleagues don’t see an entrepreneur as a valid career lifestyle path. They don’t see you as being accepted into society’s norm. I think once people can get past that and realize that they are on their own journeys and we have to stay in our own lane, only at that point can we really start focusing on work that actually matters.”

“Because the work that matters, often doesn’t fit into what’s accepted in society. That’s because society by nature doesn’t want to innovate; it doesn’t want to create new opportunities; it doesn’t want to solve problems. By nature it’s stagnant and so large.”

“You have to move past being accepted into what people want you to do or expect of you in order to do work that matters.”

GENERAL NOTES:

Justin Lafazan – Entrepreneur, Author, Speaker & Consultant – JustinLafazan.com

• Featured in Forbes, USA Today, The Huffington Post, Inc. Magazine and more.

• Justin Lafazan is an acclaimed entrepreneur, speaker, author and consultant…all at the age of 19. He’s on a mission to inspire the world’s young people to design the lives they want to live, through entrepreneurship.

• Justin began his adventure with the creation of Students4Students College Advisory, a full-service higher education consulting agency.

• After his acceptance to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, Justin noticed the development of an interesting paradox in the upper echelon admission process.  After months of research, Justin oversaw the growth of S4S from a hometown startup to a multinational conglomerate, servicing clients from NY to Cairo to Switzerland.  S4S helped students across the globe gain admission to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and more.

• Enjoying his experience helping youth maximize their potential, Justin wanted to further leverage the power of young people.  Millennial Marketing Strategy was born, an international digital marketing consulting group.  MMS supports small to medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs grow online…fast.  No employee at MMS is over the age of 25.

• Passionate about connecting youth, Justin is the curator of the Next Gen Summit, an environment for young entrepreneurs to connect, collaborate, and inspire. We bring together the coolest most badass millennials to hang for a weekend and learn from each other. Every speaker is under 25, they’re usually Forbes 30 u 30, Time 25 u 25 or Thiel fellows. Not just entrepreneurs but also scientists inventors and the youngest elected politicians in the world.

• Justin is an acclaimed speaker, and has been honored to speak at TEDx three times.  Justin delivers keynotes, lectures, and panel discussions on young entrepreneurship, collaborative ecosystems, youth underemployment, and the ‘art of the hustle.’ He is recounting his story, along with those of fellow millennial entrepreneurs, in his book (Nov, 2015)