What I’ve learned is, many of the most successful entrepreneurs, artists and individuals had little or only some formal education. Some came from absolutely nothing, while others came from upper-middle-class backgrounds. Most of these men and women applied street smarts to get ahead.

Applying street smarts to your career or business practices and habits will take you far, and is something that I believe is totally underutilised. For some people, ‘street smarts’ — or ‘the hustle’, as I sometimes call it — might seem underhanded, conjuring up images of drug deals. But to me, being street smart means thinking fast on your feet, understanding human nature, being loyal, being cool and focused, and keeping in mind that everyone is looking out for themselves. I look at examples like my father. Everything he learned that has made him successful came from learning on the street — not from studying. It may sound unconventional, but when you ask someone one year out of university if university is different from their applied work, their answer is usually ‘Absolutely yes!’

Think fast on your feet

Starting before you’re ready and keeping up the hustle means you have to think fast. In the first Indiana Jones movie, one of the characters asks Indiana what’s next in their plan. ‘I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go along’, he answers. When you’re building your own path, there’s no boss but you. You might be employed and have a boss, but they’re not responsible for growing your career and achieving your goals. You are. ‘The buck’, as US President Harry Truman knew, ‘stops here’. You’re the decision maker, and when it comes down to it you have to make sometimes stressful, lightning-fast decisions. Yes, you’ll have the help of mentors and associates, friends and family, but the responsibility is yours. The more you get used to facing big decisions, and seeing the bigger picture pros and cons clearly rather than being lost in the details, the more confidence you’ll gain. Those who keep it simple and act fast are the ones who get ahead.

As CEO and executives, we have to think on our feet every day. Recently I had planned to spend a full afternoon on important business, and at noon one of my sales reps said, ‘They just got back to us. You can meet the owner of NBL [the National Basketball League] this afternoon’. I instantly responded, ‘Okay, cool. Where have I got to be to meet him?’ Meeting him was very important for long-term results, so I made the quick decision to sacrifice the meetings I’d planned for that afternoon to make it happen. You need to be able to make lightning decisions, particularly when you know they’ll pave the way for the future. The more clarity you have on your professional and personal priorities, the quicker you’ll be able make decisions because you’ll instantly be able to analyse what matters most to you.

People can get paralysed when making a decision because they’re worried they’ll make the wrong decision, and they try to avoid doing that at all costs. But the worst decision is the one you don’t make. Yes, if you have the time to think it through, cross the t’s and dot the i’s. If you have concerns you need to talk through, take the decision to the right person who is qualified to give advice. Too many people spend too long in the grey area, unsure what to do. Don’t dwell on things. Make a decision and move forward. The best decision is the one you make. Taking action is the best decision, and through action you make it the right decision.

Understanding human nature

By nature I’m an eternal optimist. I always have been, and I’m sure I always will be! So when OTG began, I was very trusting, and when I met someone who wanted to work with me I thought, ‘Amazing! That’d be great!’ My trusting nature has opened doors for me as a networker and businessperson, but it has also interfered with my gut instinct. I’ve been let down by people a lot, more often than I can remember, and I’ve made the mistake of trusting the wrong people. At least every instance of adversity and challenge has paved the way for me to have a stronger mind, and taught me a stark lesson in human nature. I’m a lot more cautious now. You get a bit less optimistic as you get wiser, though I do believe it’s good to stay optimistic.

The professional and business world can be dog eat dog at times. Everybody’s been burned at some point — if not multiple times. Sadly, it seems to be part of the game. You need to recognise this early on, and build your ‘trust circle’ early on. This is a must.

Two years into OTG I was advised to hire a general manager. ‘You need to get someone to help run the day-to-day, so you can get out and do what you do best.’ I met a great guy who was in his early 40s, and he took a big risk by coming to work for me. I’m sure I was paying him nowhere near the money he could have earned elsewhere, and he was based in Queensland so he was travelling to Canberra regularly for work. We had a good relationship and I gave him a fair amount of autonomy in the business, both in the running of things and with my finance guy. After some months I realised that a few transactions were not matching up in the reconciliation of accounts, and when I looked deeper I realised he was taking out personal expenses that I wasn’t approving and that I had no visibility on. I asked him about it, and he couldn’t answer me straight. I told him, ‘You’ve broken my values about being open and honest. If you had come to me and talked about it, it would be a different story. But you’ve done this behind my back’. I fired him that day. OTG lost about $20 000 over a few months as a result of these expenses. Being a small business that was just getting off the ground, it almost broke us. I learned this was also my stupid fault for not having the mechanisms or tools to ensure goals were being met. I’m sure he meant well and it wasn’t the right fit, but it never feels good.

Today I understand human nature: everyone has their own agenda, as they should. It’s something I often pose to my team: What are you aiming to get out of this? Where do you want to be in three to five years? How can you use me to get ahead? And I keep in mind that their agenda will not always be in alignment with my company’s agenda. It’s natural in business for it to not always work out for people. That’s fine. I’ve had to develop the skill of properly listening to my gut. It’s one of the key attributes my father taught us kids — ‘always trust your gut instinct’ — but I had to make a few mistakes to fine-tune it. Today, my gut is my first and foremost decision-making tool. I hire and fire off it, from staff and shareholders to friends and acquaintances. Sometimes the nicest person in the world is the one who screws you the most.

Be loyal

One of the most — if not the most — valued virtues held by those on the streets, whether it’s a hustler in Los Angeles or a Mafioso in Sicily, is loyalty. Loyalty is what saves lives in their work, and in the professional world it can save careers and businesses. Loyalty carries people through the hard times, and propels them in the good times. Those you are loyal to, and who repay you with their own loyalty, will help you weather storms, provide their insights and street smarts, and can help you with your blind spots. Whether they’re family, a trusted colleague, a mentor or a friend, these people will have your back and you’ll have theirs. Now I’m lucky. I have loyal people close. I’ve been loyal to them and they to me. It’s a real-deal, super great feeling.

The world is changing and people are somewhat less loyal now than they used to be because they have more options available to them. It’s making loyalty even more important. The challenge with us Millennials is that we want to have everything quickly. We want to make a big difference in our jobs in six months. We want to feel important in a year. We want to feel love in a month. But life doesn’t work that way; everything that’s good takes time. And loyalty takes time to build. But once there, loyal people will see you through thick and thin.

I have a staff member who joined our team after begging me for six months for an internship. I didn’t have the time to take him on at first, but after six months of him hustling I said, ‘Okay, let’s get you started as an intern. You can start building out some databases for me’. He’s a very smart and driven guy from Pakistan with a Master’s Degree in Finance and a Bachelor’s Degree in Finance and Business Economics, and yet he was thrilled. After six months of being an intern he was begging me for a job. ‘Yep, I love your work,’ I said, ‘let’s make it happen.’ So I created a job for him. Over the next six months he quickly learned everything about working in our production area, so we moved him into a production role. He was loyal to me and I was loyal to him. Today he’s a middle manager kicking goals for us. He could have earned a lot more money and been provided more opportunities elsewhere in the short term, but we gave him this path, created roles for him, and he is massively thankful and loyal. After two and a half years with us we began sponsoring him on a visa to become a permanent resident of Australia, which is massive for him. His parents are over the moon he’s getting permanent residency, and he’s stoked that he’s proving to everyone back home that he can make it. And he can. He’ll do anything for his teammates at OTG, as would we for him. Over two and a half years he progressed further and was promoted more than most, and it’s because of his great work and his loyalty. He will inevitably be very, very successful with or without us. These are the stories of why I love doing what we do.

Be cool. Be calm. Be focused.

On the street and in the boardroom, it’s good to be cool under pressure. You need to look at things differently, and occasionally have a laugh. If you’re into sport you’ll know that the best of the best win not because they don’t make mistakes — they win because they’re calm and focused under pressure. It’s the battle of the mind meeting reality, and it’s where they thrive. Think of Tiger Woods when he was on the eighteenth hole and down two strokes and came back to win, or Roger Federer when he was at game point to win the set at Wimbledon … You can see the look in their eyes: it’s as if everything around them disappears, and their sole focus is the shot. It’s a meditative state that can be achieved with practice, and it applies to the boardroom, a job interview, asking for a promotion and doing a deal just as much as it does on the green or the court.

That level of focus is all in the mind, and the great news is we can train our minds to do it — Tiger Woods and Roger Federer weren’t born with it, they learned it. Anxiety is normal, and controlling anxiety is totally possible. That’s not to say the required level of focus is easily achieved — but countless individuals achieve it every day. Your fear will still be there, but it’ll be under control. That’s what the athlete, the surgeon, the musician, the CEO and the street-smart person understands. Fear is normal; defeating it takes willpower and practice; and nothing worth winning or achieving comes without its own set of struggles, obstacles and doses of fear. For me the blessing of having a serious heart condition, as well as severe short-sighted eyesight, taught me from a young age how to be calm in stressful situations. When you’re 17 and your heart is beating at 240 beats per minute, panicking is the least helpful thing to get your heart rate down again. I’d have to calm myself, focus on the beats and watch the time to know if I’d need to go to hospital.

Be cool and focused, and you’ll be ahead of the game. A great saying to remember is look and act like the dumbest and most ‘chilled’ in the room — then you can attack much better.

Put yourself first — it’s not a bad thing

Keep in mind that everyone is looking out for themselves. This doesn’t mean that everybody is inherently selfish, but it does mean we’re hardwired for self-preservation. The decisions we make boil down to, ‘What’s in it for me?’, or ‘What’s in it for me and the people I represent or care about?’ Even charitable organisations have to be selfish — they fight for dollars for their dependants that might otherwise go elsewhere.

Putting yourself first in your life is important because if you don’t put yourself first, no-one else will. It’s really about respect. Too many people don’t do this in their jobs, in their relationships and in their ideals. Love to another is most possible by those who love themselves first. Just as parents manage to take some time for themselves so they’re replenished and can be there emotionally for the family. To be able to feed others, you first need to be fed. And once you’re fed, you’ll have the energy to help others. Putting yourself first shows you respect yourself, are proud of what you’re doing and want to be able to give back.

Begging, borrowing and stealing

Let’s look at the three aspects of street smarts that are not so virtuous: begging, borrowing and stealing. Now, I’m not advocating you do any of these (apart from borrow), but let’s turn these three tools of the street-smart hustler on their head for a moment and see how they can be used wisely.

Begging

Instead of begging, let’s call it persistence. Sometimes people won’t return your calls or emails. Everybody’s busy. Perhaps they’re leaving their position and are yet to announce it, or maybe there’s a new deal in the works that you haven’t been privy to. In my experience, it’s always best to persist. If getting hold of them is worth the effort and time, keep knocking on doors, calling, emailing and making sure that whoever you’re trying to reach doesn’t forget about you. Never ever settle. Persist. The best sales guys I have never stop.

Borrowing

Let’s forget the financial aspect of borrowing for a moment, and instead think about borrowing … ideas. In art, borrowing (and outright stealing!) has been going on since time began. Why reinvent the wheel if you can take the geniuses’ ideas, add significant value and prosper? In business, ideas are everywhere. Don’t think that because somebody else is doing something, you can’t. You can borrow their idea and make it unique, playing on your own strengths.

I saw McDonald’s design-your-own burgers, and from that I invented OTG’s customisation station for apparel. It has helped OTG lead the way in innovation without building something brand new. I’d had an increasing number of customers who wanted to interact physically with our product, rather than only be able to design their garments online. They wanted to feel the fabrics and see the colours in person. At the same time, I was having conversations with retailers who wanted to offer something like custom-made apparel or uniforms in stores. So I created a digital tablet that goes with a garment rack where people could touch and feel the fabrics and try them on. They literally design their own product in store, at a kiosk. OTG’s customisation stations are currently launching in Australia, and they mean we’ll be able to continually scale around the country without having to open our own stores. It’s offering customers the really cool experience they want, and is bringing something new and inventive to the marketplace.

Stealing

Innovation, in many ways, is improving on existing ideas. Those ideas are shared, or some would say they’re stolen. In the world of personal computers the idea of having a mouse was groundbreaking. In fact, when Steve Jobs first saw it, he jumped around the room shouting, ‘Why aren’t you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing. This is revolutionary!’ Steve Jobs saw the mouse on a tour of Xerox (which he had hustled and negotiated to get). And Xerox had originally ‘stolen’ the idea for a mouse from a Stanford Research Institute researcher, Douglas Engelbart, and made some improvements on it themselves.

Many people have accused Bill Gates of stealing from Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs of stealing from Xerox. In an ‘Ask Me Anything’ on Reddit (which is an online social news, content rating and discussion website), Bill Gates was plainly asked, ‘Did you copy Steve Jobs or did he copy you?’ His reply was: ‘The main “copying” that went on relative to Steve and me is that we both benefited from the work that Xerox Parc did in creating graphical interface … Steve hired Bob Belleville, I hired Charles Simonyi. We didn’t violate any IP rights Xerox had’.

Or, put another way, in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs he reported that when Jobs first accused Gates by saying, ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’, Gates replied, ‘Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it’.

Today people are innovating more than ever before, with things constantly being improved. If you see an idea that you think can be done better, like Steve Jobs when he saw the mouse, get out there and innovate.