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Steve Weiss

Entrepreneur, World Traveler, Online Marketer

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Dear My Younger Self

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Dear 16 Year Old Steve,

The world isn’t perfect.

I know how you feel, you are at the earliest stage in life where you are fighting hard to be successful and to prove people wrong. The chip on your shoulder from not making the basketball team last year, the daily hurting inside from your 8th grade teachers giving you unwarranted detentions and putting you down in front of the class. I get it, it totally sucks right now but you will prove doubters wrong in a big way in the future.

Sadly, the chip on your shoulder and the need to prove something to people won’t ever go away, it will sometimes drive you to madness.

First some bad news ,you will experience great tragedy that you need to overcome in your early 20’s, someone close to you that cares deeply about you will pass away abruptly but he will always be there for you. (*Spend as much time with LEN as he is the father figure that you have always looked for.) This event aka Hurricane Sandy will have a long-lasting impact on you.

I know right now your feeling a sense of mis-trust for people overall, but your MOM is the one who will never let you down. She is your rock, but the friends you have or the people who you claim to be your friends there is something I need to tell you about them that you won’t believe. It is that you probably won’t see or hear from them in your later adult years, cause your on a completely different path then most of your peers. [Read more…] about Dear My Younger Self

Chase Meaning and Find Love

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As I sit here in the 31st year of my life in the year 2016, I have come to the conclusion that the only way to truly enjoy the fruits of hard work and labor is to find “Meaning”. Recently I found out that money doesn’t bring “meaning” nor does “world travel”, nor “partying” nor does continuously doing activities that involve leveraging large amounts of material goods to artificially build short-term happiness.

“Meaning” and its ugly little step-child brother “purpose” have eluded me for a long time now. I have though found success and I think my finding of “success” will only continue and will most likely keep reaching a larger and larger levels because over the last couple years or so I have made success a priority.

This year “meaning” will be a priority.

I have though found “meaning” in doing selfish activities as of recently over Christmas, buying dinner for as many homeless people as I could find in Santa Monica CA. This was in my opinion a “selfish act” of goodness because in essence it was me doing an act of selfishness to help someone in need. I did it because it made me feel good inside and I call that selfish.

I have looked for “meaning” in religion,  but didn’t or haven’t as of yet found any “meaning” in religion. On that note, I dislike how religion is put in the same word as faith. I have a lot of faith, faith in myself, faith in god, but I don’t have a ton of faith in religion. I have a great set of respect for my rabbi and people who have dedicated themselves to religion, but haven’t found any “meaning” or “purpose” in being religious. Why that is, I don’t know?

With that said, just as I chase “success”, in 2016 I am going to chase “MEANING”. I am going to chase it with all the rigor and put all that emotion, energy, and enthusiasm I got to find it.  I am going to have to make sacrifices, there is going to be some people in my life that inhibit me and take me farther and farther away from “meaning” and to those people I will respectfully become another number and another memory. To the people that bring me closer to meaning, I will invest my time and energy around you and will do whatever I can to bring you closer to “meaning” and at the time push you to great length’s to become the person you always envisioned yourself because the reality is, you are just a little “meaning” away from being there.

I challenge you, to find “meaning” as I am 100% confident that 2016 will be my most meaningful year yet of my life.

{For Early Stage Startups} This is The Best Time To Start Acquiring Users

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I started my first {real} company when I was 17 years old (2001), it was a digital marketing platform that connected mortgage lenders with mortgage borrowers. I had no clue what the process was behind getting a mortgage nor did I understand the amount of money and affect on people’s live that I mortgage had. I did though have a number of companies that were mortgage lenders approach asking that I generate leads for them and they would then in turn pay me out on a cost per lead basis.

To me, generating leads was the act of finding “people who were interested in borrowing money” it didn’t seem quite out of the ordinary as even though I was still young I had marketed a lot more unique products earlier in my career. I didn’t know that brokers charged large fees for doing loans, all I knew was they offered to pay me $20+ to get a user to fill out a mortgage form and I was going to find a way to generate a significant amount of leads, even if I had to invest almost all my free time into it.

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5 Things I Learned From My Childhood

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I haven’t blogged in a while, and for those of you who in the past have read my blog regularly I apologize for that.

Overall, who we are is a by product of our past and the stuff we experienced as kids.

I feel like I had an incredible childhood, my mom worked 3 jobs and raised me and my sister without much assistance from anyone else. I had a step father who treated me like his adopted son and whom taught me how to be a man and made sure I knew how to treat people. I was totally unaware of the financial difficulties that my mom went through raising me, all i knew was when a new pair of Jordan’s came out or I wanted to go to Basketball camp all those desires always came true. Looking back on it my mom scratch and clawed and did whatever it took to make sure I always felt like I had everything.

Some lessons from my childhood include:

(A) Being Humble: Yesterday, i was getting ready for a video shoot for my company and I remember thinking about how awkward I still feel having all these employees working under me. They all seem to look up to me as a leader which gave me this weird feeling inside.

I just kept thinking to myself, how fortunate I am to work with these people. The reality is, they are just as smart as me and have just as much ability as I do but they put trust in me each and everyday to lead them to success and that is one of the most empowering feelings.  [Read more…] about 5 Things I Learned From My Childhood

Growth Hacking Your Own “Info Product”

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I am sure you have seen all the “ads” in your Facebook Newsfeed that sell “information” on particular subjects such as “make money”  and they always ask you to enter in your email to get something for “free”. They rarely ask you right off the bat for your credit card.

In essence,  in most cases these info-marketers are selling you the exact strategy on how to create profitable “information products” and the product that you the consumer are actually buying is specifically the strategy and insight that they are currently using to sell their info product.

[Read more…] about Growth Hacking Your Own “Info Product”

Chase What Is Genuine

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What does “Genuine” mean to you?

An example of genuine is relationships.

It’s a proven fact that they’re ulterior motives between most of our inter-personal relationships in life. This includes  love relationship ,friendships and others but in my opinion its those 1 or two special relationships that make life worth living and easier to endure.

In these friendships, the ulterior motives are based on a mutual feeling of empathy, in which both sides have a strategic goal of empowering the other. Most of these friendships can be described as “genuine”, because they’re is real feeling between both parties. [Read more…] about Chase What Is Genuine

Evolution of Dating

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I like to think that in 30 years on this earth, that I am evolving a rapid rate when it comes to interpersonal communication and personal growth. One area that I think I have grown up a lot in is the “dating” area, I used to be a terrible dater mainly because I had no awareness of my surroundings.

Evolving by definition is “develop gradually, especially from a simple to a more complex form”, when I started dating I was only 16 years, just a nice innocent jewish boy trying to figure $hit out. [Read more…] about Evolution of Dating

The First Time You Experienced Death

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Do you remember the first time that you experienced death? Not like dying, but experiencing more or less the act of losing someone close to you.

I remember the first time, it was Grandma and she was 92 years young. Way to young to leave this world, I am sure you would agree.

She helped raise me and was always there to babysit me when my mom worked two jobs to support me and my sister. My earliest recollection of her was the times in which she would scream as a child. She would always say “shut and clean your tuquist”. For those of you don’t know, the tuquist is yiddish for “ASS”. On top of all the Yiddish slang that she taught me, the women could also cook a mean matza ball. [Read more…] about The First Time You Experienced Death

Your Mind Is Your Reality

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I feel like, I have come a long way in the last 3 years. As I reflect on the choices I have made in life, I keep coming back to the theory that our minds create the reality and reality is only a by product of our minds. 

About 3 and a half years ago, I got dismissed from law school for a combination of grades and other stuff that I won’t disclose. I remember feeling no remorse for my actions in law school, I didn’t feel bad at all for being dismissed.

I felt more relieved. I didn’t take law school very seriously and to be honest I thought it was made up of a bunch of pretentious clowns who were drenched in some falsely perceived self righteousness that I just didn’t believe in. This is just another story in itself.

Up until I went to law school I was scared of failing. I put so much time and effort into preventing failure that I put less time into making things successful. I feel like law school was an incredible learning experience for me and in a weird way a turning point.

From law school, I then moved back to New Jersey, to be close to family. I thought from there, my path would be to work in online advertising in some facet and live in NYC and have the quote on quote YUPPY life-style that most intelligent kids from the suburbs always fall into.

You get the job you hate that makes the cash you crave, the phony friends who are only friends because they live in your vicinity, the dog you love, the girlfriend, the wife, and then you move back to the suburbs once you have the child. I thought I was going 100% on the YUPPY route. Maybe I should have done that, who knows.

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