Steve Aoki
Appearances
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Yeah, I think when I think collaboration, I think of your contribution. And so this brings me back to day one for me. So when I got, when I found music as like, okay, this is going to be my life. my lifestyle, my culture, everything.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
But when I was like 15 years old, that's when I understood this this this term collaboration, but more this this idea of like how much can I contribute to something I love to this community? And then it's a collaboration because you have to come to the table with something, right?
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
So if you're going to collaborate, if we're going to collaborate, it's not like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to be just chilling and you're going to do all the work and it's a collaboration. Like the best collaborations is like the premium contributions from everyone in that group. And then you get a one plus one equals 100. Right. But if everyone's too passive...
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
then you're going to get a one plus one equals two, you know?
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
So it's like, I learned, luckily I learned this, this idea of contribution and how important that is to my community when I was so young, because, because in the punk hardcore scene, which is what the music genre I got involved in, it was so small that everyone's, everyone had an impact and we felt the impact, you know, how did everyone have an impact?
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
So you think about it like this. The way religion works, the way sports work, whatever communities there are that have a strong sense of, oh, I want to be part of it, this kind of feeling of bonding. It's all based on how do you spread the message How did you get people to understand what you believe in is so strong?
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Like I believe in this so strongly, I'm going to knock on every door and tell everyone about the word of Jesus Christ or whatever it might be. So very similar to that with this scene, our scene is so small. There's only like a few kids. I remember it was like five kids in my high school that listened to this music and no one gets it because it's screaming music and scratching guitars.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
But like once you feel it, you're like, oh, this is changing my life. I just want to figure out how do you get the message out? You have to write a zine. You have to interview bands. You have to put on shows in abandoned warehouses. You have to start a band because you can because there's no one else doing it. You have to learn music. It's all these things. You're no longer a passive...
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
participant and this is like the main differential i think is when i listened to music before then i was i was a passive participant like listening oh this is cool i'm like i love these lyrics i'm going to sing the songs i'm you know i like this man or this group to like being a creator in the space because you now have an impact
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Like when I make a zine at Kinko's and I'm like putting my stuff together and my poetry and putting this in and I give it to someone, it actually people are going to care about it because there's not many people doing it. Right. So it was like at that point, I was lucky to have this kind of onboarding into contributing. And then that essentially that's collaboration.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
So like the more you contribute, that's actually a quality service or quality thing that's like actually impacting your liberal culture. You once you feel it resonates with you, then you want to do it again in a different means. You know, like I first started doing Xena and I see a band. I'm like, oh, I can do that, too.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
I want to like pick up guitar and and with my friends that don't know how to play, we're going to we're going to thrash around. And all of a sudden, like we get good by the by the nature of just doing it, you know. And then that same philosophy has transcended in every single industry and every single evolution of my life.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
my identity wow like everywhere it doesn't matter what it is it's like i have this ability to just as long as i have this passion to contribute whatever i know like my toolbox i can bring to the table and then also when you go into a collaboration when you contribute you can't be like running the show and trying to try to be like the the big man but it seems like a lot of people
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Whenever you add the maximum value, your output is going to be greater than what you think. So that's, like, it's just, this is the kind of thing you learn early on. So once you put in all the time, then... At least for yourself, there's obviously records that I've spent a lot of time, way more time than records that just naturally flowed in. It was a very quick process and they blew up.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And these ones don't happen, you know? You spend more time on stuff that doesn't blow up. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And other things, it's like one day and it's like the biggest thing ever. Yeah, so like to manage that, okay, this is like, I'm going to digress a bit. To manage that, once I started seeing that and it like kind of hurts your ego a bit, right?
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
You're like, I spent so much time on this and it just didn't pop off or make the impact you expect it to make. You just have to, you have to like level the whole field of your expectations of, I mean, back then it wasn't streams, but, you know, whatever it might be, how you indicate a success of a song.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
I have to, I just like at this point, I don't even think about, I mean, we have this managerial conversations, which like that's what the managers do. is how do you make this record get more visibility or listenership? But for me, I just need to know, in my heart, genuinely, I'm happy with it, whether it gets whatever.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Exactly. You've got to love it. Yeah, that's the core of it, for sure. And then I look retrospectively, okay? Then I can be strategic, right? But in the moment, I don't want to affect my creative process. Yes. But retrospectively, I'm like, okay, this didn't work. And now I have to learn to pivot. And I have to learn to try things.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And that's the nature of being, I guess, an entrepreneur in many ways.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
and innovators that you need to learn how to pivot and, and with culture being so unforgiving and so fast paced, you know, constantly changing. Yeah. And how, how fast, how fast the attention spans are going and, and how, you know, you have to be ahead. You have to constantly reinvent yourself and, and pivot fast.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
So, and it's like, it's why it's never, it's a very tiring, it can be very tiring as a creator. Cause you can't just like rest on your laurels or you can't,
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
So before we get to that, I do like this thing you're saying, like how you would like to elevate who you're interviewing. It's like this collaboration is more about elevating someone else. So that really is the magical sauce in the studio. So when I'm in the studio with with an artist that comes, you know, now they end up coming to my house or because my studio is in my house.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And I have a studio here in L.A. Actually, I did I did some legendary sessions here in L.A. and it's still here. So I have a studio here and I have studio in Vegas. But in any case, I think the magical dust in this whole thing is is like to elevate them. You know, it's not about me. Like, they're already coming to me. That's already enough.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
They already know that, like, they're like, I want to work with that Steve Aoki, like, power production, whatever it is that they come for. So, like, I don't need to flex or do anything. I'm going to do it anyways. Right. You're going to have your moment. I'm going to do it. Like, I don't need to show it. It's about, like, empowering them. Yes.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And giving them center stage and giving them this feeling of, well, you're talking about this, like, this is about you. Letting them shine. Yeah, I want to let you shine. And then we can decide how we want to take it, what direction, what emotion, what, like, you know, are we going to go more in your lane? Are we going to go more in my lane? Are we going to,
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
take a whole new different lane you know and that's that that you find out later on once the creative process is going like oh actually we're going to go more this direction because that flow is more reminiscent of this and now what we want it to resonate with people here right so it's like i think that's like um the power of collaboration to get the the best output for what you're doing
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
is really is really about giving more and also learning and becoming more of a student and listening. So, yeah, I mean, it is a power of contribution, what you're contributing, but when you've already kind of made it, you don't need to show that because you're going to contribute anyways. Yes. So by the track record, you're like this particular person, you could tell they contributed plenty.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
You know that their pattern is to contribute at the maximum level, right? You want to work with those people. Yes. Because you've already seen the track record. Yeah. So like I want to work with them. And then when you're in the studio, then you then the human to human connection starts. Right. And if you're like overpowering, you're going to you're going to take away their creative space.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Like I'm here to like let you shine. And the more and more they feel that, and the more environment I give them to be in that zone, it's them. That's beautiful. Then the magic will happen. But it takes time to get there sometimes. Sometimes it takes a whole two sections. Sometimes it's immediate. You just don't know because everyone's different.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
more successful financially or have more of an audience if you made it more about you this I don't think so I think yeah I think if you hoard too much the I mean the world loves like this transparency you know it's like and like now the way the way the world is it's like like they want to see all of it you know so if you're hoarding and you're like I mean there's like there's no real secrets though
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
You know, of course, like, yeah, yeah, like, you know, the secret sauce to pizza and, like, the sauces and the secret, you know, like, yeah, of course, it tastes a little different. But, like, the ingredients are all the same. Yeah. You know? Music's music. It can be made differently, you know?
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
So, at the end of the day, it's, you know, it's, like, I don't care to hide any of that because there's nothing to really hide. There's no, like, secret in the cakes, right? There is a six-page cake writer that gets sent to promoters so they have to follow because I need that cake to explode all over someone's face. Sure, sure. There's no secret to my production.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And honestly, my music, I want it to evolve and change. So the secret or whatever, the ingredients of my production is always going to innovate and change anyways. And the more people I work with, it's going to change even faster.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Right. And I bring in not just singers to the studio or other producers. I bring in instrumentalists, musicians. I'm like, I want to hear a sax player this time. That's cool. Someone else. I play guitar riff. I'm like, I need to get that played better and different. But here's the base of what I want. And I'll bring in a guitarist that's going to take that to the next level. Wow.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Because at the end of the day, I have to remember, I'm the producer. So as a producer, you're listening for what is the best of all the takes. And the best of all takes, you can't be selfish and be like, they're all my takes. No. No. You know, there's going to be a better singer. I've seen I sing a line. I'm like, I need someone else to sing it better.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
You know, or I have like a bunch of different people come into my house. We do writing camps and take different rooms and and we build like the kind of like the mood board of what we're going for over the day. but with freedom to kind of expand and then, you know, just allow everyone to be free.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And then as the producer and the A&R, the ear, which I trust that, then I kind of pick my favorite parts and then go, we're going to Frankensteiner, comp and stein, all these together. Comp and stein's cool. And comp these like ideas into one thing, you know, and then I go, oh, this fits these five different artists I'd like to hit up, you know, and then I do some
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
outreach right and then you know and like you know it's like most of the time it's like you can't if you hit up like hey manager can you hit up their manager and like yeah they can but like that usually falls on deaf ears like yeah artists artists yeah that starts the conversation because they have to really want it too
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And then they'll go, all right, team, you guys do the work that we started this.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
So I'm absolutely competitive. Right. Absolutely competitive. I like everything is a competition. Not necessarily with other people though. Right. Okay. So that's like, I think that's a major difference. Interesting. So, and I compete with myself with everything, you know, and this is not just like for music. This is like my health. I know. Biomarkers.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Everything. Yeah. Like, you know, I got my... i got like all kinds of data like data is everything right so i love data in this regard because that's how you truly can better yourself compete with your previous self and you know i do my my my blood draws and just check all my levels and go okay i need a little bit more here a little bit less of this how do i tool this i that's a fun game to gamify
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
how you compete with yourself is actually fun and it engages you more. And I'm a big, I'm really big into gamifying. I like gamifying everything I do because it makes it more interesting. And then, of course, you know, you do something consistently over time, it's no longer a chore. Right? So I already know, understand that. It's your lifestyle. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
In the beginning, like, if you don't gamify it, it makes it more difficult. Whether it's, like, stop eating certain carbs to...
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
working out a certain amount of time to doing something that you need to do consistently that takes a lot of time or doesn't, like meditation, whatever it might be, or reading a book or something like that, where you could easily disregard it and carry on through your life and feel satisfied, but you could always be more enriched. Right. So I gamify competition with myself on all levels.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
But you collaborate with others. Yes. I mean, collaboration is part of this competition. Tell me more about that. Yeah. So like, like to be, to be more like, like at the end of the day, I think one of my goals is just one of my consistent goals. I don't, I don't say it out loud. It's like unconscious. I care deeply about being a global artist because I love touring the world.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
I love playing in front of fans from all different like aspects and parts of the world. Right. So I love that. I love that I've been consistently touring and playing in front of, you know, playing all over the place for, you know, for 15 plus years. I want to continue doing it. So with that intention, the collaborative process is a huge part of that.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
You know, if I like go to Australia, I'm like booking myself in the studio. You know, whether it's not, you know, I remember I did that. I worked with Trippie Redd there, but I didn't. I didn't work with Australian artists, but my intention is to work with artists of that region to learn, to collaborate, to try to build bridges and make new kinds of music and new kinds of art.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Yeah. So the health part, I think it's about eliminating certain things. So when as an artist, you're pampered. You're a spoiled little brat. So you get whatever you want, really. I mean, it's like, you can just get whatever. So like you could become a gluttonous human and just be like, just feed me everything I want. You know, like you can get to this point.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
So it's about not, you know, having discipline. Discipline is a really important key aspect of survival, one, and figuring out what, you know, what is healthy for you long-term, the long game. Because we all want to have that dopamine rush.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
We all want to have that luxury of not being comfortable, whatever it is, because we have the means and we have the finances and we have the access to be comfortable. Right.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
It's just easy to have it all. And but it's just it's a discipline game. So like it's about like what's more important to you. So I think that question. Yes. You need to answer that question and have a firm understanding of your answer early on and be very clear.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
I think like a lot of these like self affirmations and things like that are really important for any artist to be like, what is it that you really want? Do you just want to like live fast, die young, that kind of style and just like be gluttonous and just go through life and then and then but you will be hurting later on. I promise you that.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Or you're going to just be burnt out and not not want to do this.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
I think it was after my father passed away in 2008. A lot of these questions about life and death and, you know, dealing with tragedy in a way where like death is as real as it gets. And then seeing friends of mine pass away, other DJs pass away, artists pass away. It's like you could have it all and just die. And I'm like, that's it. Life's over. Or your career is gone.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And you're like, how do these careers just disappear? It might be of their own accord as well, too. It could be for any reason. But I love what I do, and I don't want to see that end. And I also don't want to die. And I also want to make sure people around me have that same kind of knowledge base that I'm learning on how to play the long game. How do you play the long game?
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Because you love what you do, for one. I love my life. I love the fact that I can do what I love to do. And so then it becomes an easier answer for me once I start putting those questions in front of me.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
and then because of you know where i am i was lucky to get the access to like find out not just what everyone already has the access to because the internet is open it's free to learn so much about health i mean a lot of what i learned about health It's just like going on like Huberman Labs podcast or Joe Rogan or whatever these different like avenues are. They're free.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And there's different people interviewing these experts, you know, you know, giving tips on like, oh, this could help. OK, let me try that. It's like in my means, you know, you know, sitting with Brian Johnson. It was like, you know, really studying his body on a daily, weekly, monthly basis on what works, what doesn't work. And it's interesting because he's in his own space always. I'm not.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
I'm moving. So we had a really interesting conversation of what are the applications I could take from what you're doing for someone that's moving as much as possible. Right. He's in the same environment every day.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Yeah, so his biological age might be 20 or 21 or something. Mine's 33, which is pretty good being 45. And I want to reduce that further by... tooling and tooling and tooling and then keeping check up on my metrics, on my analytics, on my blood, on my whole levels and everything. So that's where I really spend, and I gamify it and I have fun with it.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And I spend a lot of time on getting the diagnostic checks. I always tell my mom that she's 80 now, like you have to have a really true sense of your diagnostics because that's the only way You know what was working, what isn't working, how to stop yourself. Now with AI, you can have these predictive models so that you don't get the cancer.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
You don't get certain things that will debilitate your energy levels or debilitate you and kill you.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
Yeah. Friendships is tough as far as like, you know, these long term friendships like, you know, and like we have a few that always keep tabs on me, which like encourage myself to make sure that I am consistently building, you know, those long term relationships and keeping finding time for them. That's difficult. That's like a very small piece of the pie chart as far as my time.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And then the majority of my friendships are people I work with. I think just generally just how- Because you're around them all the time. Yeah, I'm around them. So the people I work with, I have to make sure- that they're great people. But you like them.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
They're not just great for what they do, but they have to be great people because that energy is going to sink into just me, whether it's my business or whatnot. It doesn't matter. It's just about me. At the end of the day, we have to always work with people that are just healthy for you. And then intimate relationships. I'm single, which is probably the big deficit as far as my relationships go.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
I've somehow held on to some long-term relationships through my really intense schedule. But as you get older, you're kind of like what you're looking for becomes a little bit smaller. And there's a certain... The window is small, so... More and more selective. Yeah, exactly.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
So it's like they have to fit in your world as much as you fit in their world, which makes it even tighter for someone like me. But I don't mind being single right now. I'm not lonely and desperate to find someone. I'm very fulfilled in all these other categories that I think I'll let time eventually just let it ride itself to the right person. Unfold it, yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
It's true. It's true. Like I do think about that, but I, I'm not rushing it. Yeah. You know, I think when I was, if I was younger, when I was younger, if when I was younger, for sure, I was like, I really need this, have this person. But then that becomes more of this codependent thing that, that I've learned to, to, you know, I understand what the codependency looks like, feels like, and is.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
It's not healthy. Yeah. Yeah. And like in a lot of my relationships, they were codependent. Yeah. And it felt so good. But I didn't understand what codependency meant until my last relationship where we got to go to couples counseling and really understand what makes our relationship healthy. How do we sustain through that?
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And what codependency feels like because I always ended up becoming that way.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
so and once i realized that then you just you you have more self-love and you just you don't need to fall or rush for something that might be unhealthy for you and luckily i have an immense love and relationship with my my mom and my sister and my brothers and my my all my siblings we have a great loving bonding relationship that I get fueled from that.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
And I see them consistently, like knowing that my mom is around the corner from me and from my house. I see her, we have lunch together, dinner. We hug, we talk, and we just, and we feel the embrace. Like that's already, I'm so lucky to have that. That's like a really big part of, like really big core of my love bank. So I'm so fortunate to have that consistently. That's beautiful, man.
The School of Greatness
How To ATTRACT Your Dreams With Your Mindset & Live Your Full Potential
That's really beautiful.