Success Story with Scott D. Clary

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there psychologically the future is a tool to shape and direct to the present one of the problems that most entrepreneurs have is that they're actually pursuing their wrong goals they don't understand that everything that they do is driven by their goals most entrepreneurs they don't go ten they don't have the actual goal to go next he's not just a psychologist he's one of the most influential thinkers on the planet today doctor benjamin hardy has written best sellers that redefine how we see the future books like willpower doesn't work and be your future self now his work has been read by millions his ideas featured in harvard business review forbes and cnbc your future is what shapes your present and that also includes your view of god obviously the life things like that those things shape who you are now say a company doing one million dollars in revenue they have a goal of getting to ten million and they wanna do it in ten years i would tell them you're never gonna hit that goal because you've put it ten years away which means you're not dealing with it today behind the titles and accolades is a deeper mission to help people break free from limitation rewrite their identities and step fully into the lives they were meant to live this isn't just about self improvement it's about transformation this is doctor benjamin hardy understanding your goals aligning your relationships with your goals if you have two fundamentally different philosophy feels about life in two totally different goals about what it means to live that relationship probably not gonna work your goal determines how you approach all these things you can actually gain trust with people even if you disappoint them by telling them the truth so getting really good at understanding what that means this then living in alignment with it usually that's gonna lead to good things and then so you are making a very bold claim in the science of scaling the ninety nine percent of entrepreneurs fail to scale not because they lack talent but because they optimized for things that shouldn't exist so talk to me about the idea that separates companies that grow ten x versus those that kind of just get stuck which i think is a majority the first the first problem and so john do he's a he's a billionaire of venture capital he said that a goal properly set is halfway reached and so one of the problems that most entrepreneurs have is that they're actually pursuing their wrong goals and they don't understand that everything that they do is driven by their goals in psychology our perception what we filter what we say yes and no to is all driven by our goals as well as the systems we build in the companies we build and so most entrepreneurs they don't go to ten x because they don't have they don't have the actual goal to go ten x and it's not an urgent goal if they do wanna go ten x it's ten or twenty or years away and that's a a poor rendering of the future psychologically the future is a tool to shape and direct to the present and the only way for it to be effective as a tool is for it to be big enough and urgent enough that it forces you to hard look at everything you're doing and so the majority of what most companies are doing to your point is optimizing stuff that if they had a hire and a better and a more urgent goal those things would go away because they're not good enough for the goal if somebody is starting a build a business or trying to scale a business what are some of the most important thoughts that they should have versus what instagram tells them or what watching a whole bunch of entrepreneur podcast podcasts you know all in podcast podcasts loves tim ferris wants to go apply to y comb all great stuff but what should they actually be focused on so the first thing which is what i already hit is is what is their actual goal and the goal actually needs to be bigger than they thought it was and more urgent right if they're starting a business most businesses are very linear like you know say i'm doing five hundred thousand dollars right michael goal might be to get to five to get to a hundred thousand right so to two x right but the problem with that is it's gonna lead to bad decisions right because what you're doing right now the decisions the young entrepreneur who's listening to this are making are the exact opposite decisions that they would be making if they were ten x are a hundred x bigger right and so you wanna start with a much bigger goal and give yourself an urgent timeline to do it no more than three years so say you're again back to doing fifty thousand a year your goal should be doing five million to ten or more million in three years or less and the reason for that is because that that goal if you let that goal be the tool that forces you to start looking more more deeply at everything you're doing it's going to force you to start coming to card conclusions faster you know you're gonna have to figure out what what it takes to build a real business what it takes to start hiring not bad people but good people what it means to actually define yourself as a business and actually have a singular focus versus doing whatever else is doing and following else is paths so so actually starting with the goal to scale and actually having a massive goal and giving yourself a short timeline is gonna force you to start getting answers that you won't get if your only goal is to get to the next linear step which is how do i get to a hundred thousand in revenue that's a bad goal that's gonna lead you to making most of the decisions you're making today which are all mistakes they're gonna honestly kill your business in the next few years there's one idea that i really do love and it and it's so interesting there's always dual realities in life or two ideas can be true at the same time because one idea that i really do love is for entrepreneurs to be successful they have to find a way to stay in the game i think it's a a originally a her idea but i'm sure it's been repurposed a million different definitely not definitely not a h idea yeah it's been know i'll tell you i'll tell you whose idea that is this this is one all that you know the idea though that i'm talking about that today so yeah so stay the game stay in the game versus win the game yes yeah and that's that goes back to infinite games versus finite games even i think alan carr someone car from like the eighties and then other people who have translated it but it's semi true but it's also it's also makes for batch strategy this is what happens when academics and when authors teach people how to do strategy because an author they're focused on on on on process over outcome but in business you really do have to focus on the outcome and you use the outcome to shape your strategy and so rather than saying i just wanna be in the game my whole life it's what game do you wanna play and how do you win and and people don't wanna talk about winning when it comes to overly focused on process but in business you actually have to say what's the game i want to play and how do i win in that game rather than how do i stay in a game or even stay in the wrong game what questions do you have to ask yourself when you're starting that we'll give you the clarity to figure out which game you should be playing i think it's really important to get connected to your own future self as a person right there's a lot of research on getting connected to your future self thinking about not who's the default version of your future self which is the extension of your current self but who is the future self that you you feel you actually would love to become and the answer to that question changes over time but as you actually get more honest about your yourself and more connected to your future yourself it becomes obvious which games you shouldn't play as an example for me i was actually growing a big youtube channel two three years ago and could have easily had a massive youtube channel right now but to me that game wasn't a game worth playing for me to be honest with you it's a bloody game in terms of a red ocean there's a lot of competition there could i have succeeded in that game i think so i think it would have massively slowed my progress and think it would have been a dead end game compared to a more efficient game as i got more connected to my future self so one is really thinking through your future self and getting honest about that one of my friends who's a a mentor and a billionaire said that the majority of reasons why entrepreneurs don't grow in scale because they lie to themselves first they lie themselves about who they really wanna be and second they lie themselves about all the things that they're doing that are counter to that it's counter to that and so most games aren't worth playing you know and i think most most games are are distractions most games are not gonna take you to where you wanna go and if you're willing to let most of those games go you can start actually winning the game you really wanna play how do you wake yourself up because again we're talking about on people that don't really have this rule book when they're going into it entrepreneurs don't really have a clear rule book i mean you you studied organizational ecology you're probably as close as you can get to going into traditional education and learning anything that's useful for business but i mean there's no real rule book and maybe you can maybe you can argue there is somewhere but roughly the science hopefully the science of skin becomes that because i think you're honestly right and i think that it's a topic that has been muddled and distracted and confusing for a really long time i wanna learn a little bit more about you people who don't know sort of where you came from and and how you got into this world so again i mentioned you you actually took a degree was it a doctorate or a masters in organizational psychology but that was your focus phd phd yeah that would be where the doctor came from that makes sense and what were some of the things that you actually learned in that degree that were useful applicable to somebody who's trying to build a business right now and i'm sure there's a lot that wasn't but what were some of the main core ideas that you actually found quite useful you still carry through what your work today i think that i learned a lot about systems theory systems dynamics levels of systems they call it levels of analysis so like as an example an employee is a different level than a team like a an employee fits within a team right and a team fits within a maybe a an an like a a sector of the business which fits within a company which fits within an industry so there's levels of analysis and and also just realizing that that human psychology and human systems are driven by goals and just really being rigorous and honest about that i think that the main things i really learned was was being rigorous you know my my so i i wouldn't i wouldn't actually say that any of the actual subject matter that i studied was ground groundbreaking although it doesn't form my thinking it was more just being rigorous right like actually questioning assumptions asking better questions you know having someone give really hard feedback even learning things like statistics which i'm honestly not that good at but having to understand how these things work so it was more about how to think versus what to think you know and then obviously being in business and writing major books actually like advising companies those things are very different but i have learned to have rigor and and willingness to get hard feedback and willingness to get correction that i think is helpful and whereas i think that a lot of entrepreneurs they maintain a kind of a sloppy identity and a sloppy mindset throughout when you talk about the science of scaling you talk about doing things differently than most entrepreneur education teachers but i would be curious if when you look at the framework and the science of scaling i mean you have a couple different one you have frame floor focus that's one i wanna understand what that means you set impossible goals you talk about two x versus ten x all these different concepts do you feel like the entrepreneurs that we look up to the and or look up to in terms of entrepreneurial success say like the richard branson or the elon musk or the mark cuban or the p the billionaires of the world do they adopt some of the are are the frameworks that they adopt in line with the science of scaling versus what the average person thinks entrepreneurship is which i think is completely different than what you teach and and should be what people adhere to and adopt i think so i i would say that a lot of these people the big names the musk's the the bezos and stuff like that they apply the type of thinking that i teach in the book maybe without explicitly knowing it like a lot of them just are naturally like like steve jobs was wanting to put a dent in the universe right obviously he didn't have small goals he was wanting to take over and reinvent computing right and so most of the people listening to this podcast aren't trying to do something that big right and so naturally they have smaller ambitions which would lead them down pathways that they would not be going down if they had ten x or hundred x bigger ambitions and so the people we're talking about have massive have massive things that they're trying to do and they're willing to to figure out how to do it even if it means going down at pathway that no one else has gone down before and even if it means risking you know you know how many times is musk risk not only is reputation but how many times does the wrist is fortune right he's willing to let go of the present for the future even if it's being a billionaire even if it's his reputation even if it's tesla right him partnering with moss or trump you know whether people agree with it or not he had to risk an enormous amount to make that bet because why because he's got an impossible goal of getting to mars right so how many people have a goal of going to mars let you know colonizing it etcetera but if you begin to understand the psychology of it everything he's doing including the unique pathways he's trying to take all stem from that goal and so the first fundamental difference between the big versus evernote everyone else is their goals are just radically different that they're willing to try to solve versus how do i have the biggest podcast in the world right they're like how can i change education right it's just a different it's a different pursuit but is there is there benefit is there benefit or distraction to to adopting that level of goal to it to thinking in terms of impossible goals is that a benefit to somebody who's trying to for example build a service based you know lawn care company or build a podcast or build i don't know a marketing agency like how do you translate these frameworks into what the majority of the people who are listening are trying to accomplish yeah so let's just say go back to that lawn care guy right let's say do you tell me how much money he's he making when he starts nothing but maybe he's trying to make you know three two three hundred thousand dollars annually in revenue or in profits know in and take home for himself that's huge that's awesome yeah i would say revenue you're probably trying to pull i can listen i don't run a long care company but i've looked at a few on biz by sell and i've watched cody sanchez enough to know that i'm sure they're making about you know a million and their trying to take home you know two three hundred thousand as a as a good small business okay awesome so the question is does that business wanna stay small or do they wanna a ten x or a fifty x extra hundred x and and if they do then they're gonna have to start thinking about their business differently they can't keep doing what they're doing right maybe they end up having maybe they end up becoming the lawn care provider for their entire state or or or offering something different and so any company can apply it but but the challenge that almost every company will face which is exactly what you just said a sunk cost bias the bigger goal even in the same industry is going to force them to remodel their company in large part or remodel their strategy and most people aren't willing to do that and so they end up staying in what they're currently doing versus innovating and doing something better but but you know at at some point that lawn care provider had to walk away from something maybe it was our job right or or something and so they did it before they they had a bigger goal they realized that their current vehicle or their current model wasn't gonna get them there so they and started something and they grew and now they've gotten to a point where they're more successful than they were prior and the question is are they willing to do that again and again or are they gonna let the past dictate where they're at do you think that many people think in terms of impossible goals or do you feel like most people let the past they dictate where they're at almost everyone lets their past determine their goals so as an example yeah so as an example i did three hundred thousand revenue last year so i'm gonna go for four hundred thousand this year they right or next year right so they're letting their past performance shape their goal versus letting the goal shape their system shape their process you always and people do that by the way naturally psychologically as well i think it's how we're trained to think i call it linear psychology or linear time where you let the past and present determine the future but that's that's also natural and how that's how people have been taught to think even in terms of their future selves they think about they let their pass and their present self dictate the model or the view of their future self but back to the buck mister fuller quote you just said you don't change things by fighting the existing reality and said you need a new model that makes your old model become obsolete well that also fits with your psychology but also your business and so with your psychology the new model would be a different future self and you let that future dictate who you are in the present and if it's a very different self say it's someone who's you know build you know growing a successful company or someone who successful or has a family in a marriage right or whatever if you let that model of your future dictate your present which is really what the future is for psychologically the future and the past or just tools for bet for better operating in the present they're not outside of you your past as an idea is in your head and it's and it's and it's driving it's dictating you but your future is also an idea in your head that's that's shaping your decisions and so if you let a brand new model of the future impact who you are today it's gonna lead you in a very different direction hubspot is a success story partner now think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking you're probably catching seventy to eighty percent of what we're talking about but let's flip that and imagine you're only catching twenty that'd be crazy right it's really not a good use of your time if you only remember twenty percent of what we're talking about but most businesses most entrepreneurs are only using twenty percent of their data all the most important details in call logs emails chat with their customers it's just left floating in digital space not being used hubspot it gives you the access to those insights to help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more visit hubspot dot com to get the full picture of your business today nets sweet is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if you ask nine experts you're gonna get ten answers bull market bear market interest rates are rising there if falling honestly at the end of the day we just need a crystal ball but until then over forty two thousand businesses have trusted and future proof themselves with nets sweet by oracle the number one cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory in hr into one cohesive platform with one unified business management suite there's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control that you need to make quick decisions with real time insights and forecasting you're pairing into the future with actionable data and when you're closing the books in days not week's you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next if i needed this kind of business management system nets sweet is exactly what i'd i do so whether or not your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions nets sweet help to respond to immediate challenges in your business and sees your biggest opportunities and speaking of opportunity you have to download the cfo guide to ai and machine learning the guide is free for all listeners that's nets sweet dot com slash to scott cla indeed is a success story partner now say you just realized your business needed to hire someone fast how can you find amazing candidate fast it's easy just use indeed when it comes to hiring indeed is all you need stop struggling to get your job posting seen on other job sites indeed sponsor jobs helps you stand out and hire faster and with sponsor jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsor jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs plus with indeed sponsor jobs there's no monthly subscription no long term contracts you only pay for results there's no need to wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash cla right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash cla terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need but when you don't have the role models you don't have the influence around you i even if even if you are you know a really ambitious person that watches a whole bunch of youtube videos and listen a whole bunch of podcasts and reads a whole bunch of books i think the average person has a really hard time listening to a future self that they have no tangible evidence that this future self can actually exist and they to fall to sort of depending on what their their past success was and they say listen it'd be great to have a hundred million dollar business but like in my heart and my soul and in my in my head i just can't understand how i can be that person i think i think it's very difficult like i don't listen i don't study this for a living so you probably have advice on this but i feel like the average person is gonna listen to this is gonna say yeah that makes sense and it's just gonna go back to their old ways of thinking like how do they actually actually become this person how do they actually believe that they can be this future self this future version of themselves that builds a massive business or achieves massive goals or has a beautiful family or you know loses the weight that they want to lose when they've been overweight their whole life it's beautiful questions and incredible questions there's a few different ways of answering that question i'll i'll i'll go the the the faith side first and then i'll go the practical psychology side second so the faith side is you know and not everyone listening to this has a relationship with a with a higher power but the more relationship you build with a higher power the less constrained you are by what you think is possible versus impossible you you know the scriptures or the bible or whatever says nothing's impossible god so one of my viewpoints is the most the more close you get with a with your relationship with god the more the more the less boundaries you put on on your own potential when it comes to psychology my view is that you don't necessarily need to believe you can achieve it before you start doing it so dan sullivan who i wrote three books with the gap and the game ten x is easier than two x as well as who not how he has a little four step model that i think is very accurate he calls it the four c's formula and and so the four c's formula is first you have to make a commitment second from commitment that takes you to courage because you're making a commitment you're making a commitment beyond what you actually know you can do and in fact when you set in impossible goals part of their value is that you don't know how to do them right that's actually the point and and and is if you if you only set goals you think you can accomplish then you are operating linearly and you're unwilling to find new ideas you're operating based off false assumptions and so one of the actual strengths again goals or tools right people have a lot of negative emotional baggage towards goals because they think if they don't hit it they're losers like they there's all these false premises even if you do hit it right that so so people approach goals and effectively goals or psychological tools for evaluating your present for evaluating what you're spending your time on for being more honest with yourself about what you're doing and then for if you choose to begin filtering and finding other pathways to getting there your brain is a natural tool at filtering it won't filter effectively though if you don't actually commit to a goal so back to to sullivan first commitment then then what happens is courage first off the courage to start letting go of the things that you know are counter to the goal right that's the stuff that we're talking about with sun cost bias begin to actually be honest and with yourself honesty steve and starts to take a little bit of courage and start eliminating the stuff that you know has no bearing on on on that bigger future the third is capability you start to build build knowledge and capabilities and pathways and relationships about that goal right to the idea of the person with a hundred million okay cool you don't have the knowledge about it right now you have no capability you've got no understanding of it but that goal is gonna force you to start learning about that world right if there is a world over there there's a we know that there's a world all these worlds you just don't know about them so your ignorance is slowing you down and stopping you so you're gonna have to start to develop some capability capabilities some knowledge some context then the fourth is what he calls confidence right what you're asking for and what a lot of people are asking for is give me the confidence before i do any of this work give me the confidence before i make a commitment give me the confidence before i deal with any courage give me the confidence before i start being honest with myself about all the stuff i'm doing that's a waste of time give me the confidence before i start gaining knowledge education relationships and experience in that world and so yeah if someone wants confidence before they're willing to make commitments act exercise courage and develop capability and knowledge they're screwed because you your confidence is earned you can't have it but if you're willing to exercise some faith use a goal as a tool not a tool as a way to make you feel like a loser but use a tool right a bigger cool use it as a tool to begin exposing and examining yourself and examining your current thinking this is what i do when i when i work with companies and i'll just use it as an example say a company doing one million in revenue and they have a goal of getting to a hundred million or even ten million say they have a goal of getting to ten million and they wanna do it in ten years i would tell them you're never gonna hit that goal why because you've put it ten years away which means you're not dealing with it today remember the few the future as a tool and if you've put it ten years away what that means is you're not doing anything about it right now and what you're actually doing is you're trying to get from one million to maybe one point two million which means you're not solving ten so what we wanna do is we wanna use the future as a tool and even your goal is a tool to start using it to more effectively examine your present so let's take that ten million let's move it to two or three years and start using it to genuinely looking at your current path because your current path is nowhere near ten million you don't even know a ten million means and that's okay but what we do know is that most of what you're now doing is nowhere near that and so start being honest about that and start developing a plan to ten million and start developing a knowledge of what that means and who you need on your team and what you'd need to do as a business to get there so again the the goal just simply becomes a tool for higher levels of honesty and then for beginning to solve it mh this would be turned into a forcing function and also i guess this then force you to examine all the the tasks that you're doing every single day i'm assuming that really makes you aware that a lot of the stuff that you do is not is not optimizing stuff that should exist a hundred percent goal determines this the goal determines why you're optimizing that shouldn't exist anything you're optimizing that shouldn't exist fits what we call below the floor so the frame determines the floor the floor defines what you don't do as steve jobs said focus is defined by what you don't do strategy expert michael porter says strategy is defined by what you don't do so and most people don't have good strategy because they're operating linearly letting the past to dictate the future and so they're doing a hundred things that are optimizing what shouldn't be done and and that's why i shared the quote from john do at the beginning that a goal properly set is halfway reached because it allows you to begin honestly examining that the majority of what you're spending your time on right now is great from the past but it's not great from the better future and so the sooner you can just be honest about that and let that stuff go the sooner you can go and find better paths that'll get you ten a hundred x the distance in the same amount of time talk to me about your your relationship with the traditional eighty twenty rule from the context of how do we get to ten x yeah it's awesome so me and dan sullivan wrote a book called ten x is easier than two x and you know dance eighty years old been coaching entrepreneurs for fifty years personally coach you know twenty thousand plus and you know while we were writing ten x is easier than two x part of me my process of writing books is that i have to really get into the weeds right and i have to really understand something and he had a lot of good insight on ten x but i still felt like we needed to drill a little deeper and ultimately he's really good at making frameworks and so you know we'd had spent a lot time talking about the eighty d twenty principle but he he basically i'll give you the simple framework but then i'll tell you how i really think about it so the simple framework from that book using the eighty twenty principle and the idea of the eighty twenty principle which they sometimes call the power law is that eighty percent of results comes from twenty percent of of it of inputs in other words eighty percent of outputs comes from twenty percent of inputs so if you look at eighty a hundred percent of what you're doing or a hundred percent of your relationships almost all the the progress the results to success is coming from a very small amount of it say twenty percent or less and so the model that we came up with in that book was if you wanna go for two x growth again you're that that lawn care company doing two hundred thousand a year if you wanted two x you can actually keep eighty percent of what you're doing you don't have to transform that much to go two x all you have to change is twenty percent maybe you need more marketing right maybe you need you know so you only have to tweak your company to go two x you only have to change twenty percent of it you can keep eighty percent of what you're now doing which means you're fundamentally operating from your past you're letting the past to dictate your growth you're letting the past dictate your strategy you're keeping eighty percent of who you are now whereas having a ten times bigger future is so big and transformative that eighty percent of what you're now doing his noise eighty percent of what you're now doing is fundamentally a distraction and so it forces eighty percent of what you're doing away and it forces you to find what's the twenty five what's the twenty percent or less of what you're doing right now that you've got a ten x you've gotta actually focus on in scale so what that means in some companies is this is that you know i was just talking to a guy right now who has a a small business you know i'm they're doing two million dollars revenue but they're awesome and and he does windows and we started to talk about the different projects they're doing and he said you know they do maybe seventy projects a year right of some of them are ten thousand dollar projects some of them are thirty some of them are fifty thousand dollar projects but once or twice a year they do a project that's a couple hundred thousand you know and so using the eighty twenty model on that my question from was well how would you what what would happen if you just optimize your business around those those opportunities right which you're like the one percent of opportunities for you where you're only doing and there a little bit more specific gigs right but like there these jobs that are a couple hundred thousand what would happen if you just ten x to those and forgot about the rest right that would be raising the floor and stripping away eighty percent of stuff right and he realized like he could ten company he could get to actually fifty million if they only did those jobs but right now they're not they're not they're their system isn't optimized for those not even looking for those jobs and they're still saying yes to all the little jobs and he out of fear of disappointing people says yes to things all the time that he knows our projects they shouldn't be doing but he he doesn't want disappoint people you know he wants to have a good name in the rep in know good reputation in his environment and stuff like that but what he doesn't realize is the the whole environment sees him as the guy who takes these little jobs because of the things he does yeah so he's created this this image in this persona for himself and it's probably just as it's just as damaging the way the customer sees him as the way he sees himself a hundred percent the i asked him i said how do you how do you think you're defining in the marketplace and he he he and he didn't really know and said well we know that they see as the guy who takes these little jobs because those the ones you get those the ones you take how do you manage all the other things outside the business that are not inc inconvenience they're not helping they're not sort of moving the needle forward what's your what's your framework for that because that's the human element of business but it's not so easy to figure out like i said everything is driven by goals back to the idea of levels of analysis some goals are higher order than others right speaking for myself my own faith my family are higher order goals than my business therefore if i needed to i would let i would sacrifice my business for my higher order goals and so understanding your goals and and in in aligning those and even victor frank talked about this long ago and man search for meaning right aligning your relationships with your goals right so the person you're married with if you have two fundamentally different philosophies about life and two totally different goals about what it means to live that relationship probably not gonna work right like those could be you know spiritual alignment or things like that but but the but honestly you know to the very practical level of when you wanna start making improvements in your life when you wanna start actually living like as i call your goal your frame and your frame determines what you see as a person we also see the world through frame and our frame determines what what we notice what we care about what we see is relevant and so it determines what we view as signal and what we view as noise and so if you if you if you're trying to like become the world's best like player on world of warcraft right frame then like you're gonna you're not gonna listen to this podcast probably unless this podcast can help you do that but you're gonna be like studying how do i become the best player on world of warcraft and so your signal and the pathways you're gonna be looking for and everything in your frame is gonna be based on that right and so your goal determines what you what you see what you look for and and and so the reason i'm saying set higher goals is because that forces your floor to go up meaning that a lot of the things you could say yes to for a local you can't say for a higher goal right and so your goal determines how you approach all these things but the easiest in my mind the easiest way to do it back to all progress starts by telling the truth and that most people are lying to themselves is you can actually gain trust with people even if you disappoint them by telling them the truth right and so if you're wanting to grow and succeed and put yourself in new environments and and and learn new things and that means decreasing what you're currently doing such as spending time with ex friends doing x activities the most healthy approach even though it still disappoint people is being honest like being transparent not making it about them not saying you're a bad person and that the the the activities and behaviors we're doing are are below my floor and and their loser activities and i wanna go be successful that's not how you do it it's it's just saying it's not making about the other person at all it's it's it's literally about this is the direction i wanna go i feel like i i i need to focus in these directions and that that therefore means like we're not gonna be able to spend as much time doing what we're doing that and so this is just the direction i feel i you go you don't have to actually apologize about it like even with this guy with the the the window company in order for his company to scale and grow and get to fifty million in three years which he wants it to from two and he can he actually knows the pathway he's gonna have to disappoint his current a lot of his current client base and start saying we don't do these projects anymore and and he can do it in a way that builds trust by saying look this is the direction our company is gonna go you can go work with other people if you know and and if you start to wanna come in this direction you know you know who to come for us for so you can gain and build trust even if it means disappointing people by being really honest the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now a quick podcast recommendation i've been listening to truth lies and work they're in the hubspot podcast network just like success story it's this husband and wife team a and lia elliott they break down why people actually do what they do at work so if you have a business if you manage people if you have to hire people any point you have to listen to show i just listened to an episode on why good employee suddenly quit that's an issue that we all have and it totally clicked for me one of the reasons i explained is why it's not usually about the money it's about all these little promises that we as founders entrepreneurs managers leaders we break without realizing it like when you tell someone you just hired that they're gonna learn all these new skills but you just keep giving them the same tasks over and over and over again it made me realize that i've probably lost a lot of good people for dumb reasons that i never noticed and hiring is one of the most important things you to figure out so if you manage people or if you just wanna understand what makes your coworkers tick it's worth checking out listen the truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast chip station is a success story partner you know what what's separate successful online businesses from literally everyone else it's not just having great products it's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back all of my friends that run the biggest e commerce companies they use ship station and it has completely transformed how they handle orders they save thousands on shipping costs thanks to the rate chopper tool that finds the best discounts and what makes ships station brilliant you never need to upgrade because it grows with your business no matter how big you get and they offer discounts up to eighty eight percent off ups d express and usps rates and up to ninety percent off fedex it integrates seamlessly with every selling channel you're already using and your customers get branded tracking updates to keep them happy and informed when shoppers choose your products you turn them into loyal customers with cheaper faster and better shipping no credit card required cancel anytime that's ships station dot com code success story hubspot is a success story partner now the future of business is happening right now and you don't wanna miss it that's why you have to be at inbound twenty twenty five they are bringing together the brightest minds in marketing sales business entrepreneurship ai for three incredible days in san francisco the global epicenter of innovation and technological disruption picture this you are learning directly from amy poe about creative leadership you're getting ai insights from da modi who's literally shaping the future of artificial intelligence here's what makes inbound special it's not just the great keynote you're gonna dive into breakout sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with all these great entrepreneurs decision makers industry leaders peers who are actively shaping the future of business from september third to fifth at the mo center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today i think that's very important because we always speak about we always speak about scaling and and and and business strategy but there's so much more to it that like even a lot of the things that you're discussing today it's yeah there's some tactical items that you can sort of pursue but a lot of it is is you're talking about different mental models different frames we're talking about future and past self like a lot of the things that actually are are sort of leading indicators of success or are less of you know the strategy that you use more of the mental model or the mindset that you adopt yeah my view is psychology psychology always shape strategy and strategy always determines time management the sad part is people talk about time management productivity without first starting with psychology or strategy and and the fundamental root of both psychology and strategy or goals honestly honestly like humans are driven by their goals they may not be aware of those goals they may have past based goals that were provoked by traumas or that they're unaware of but humans are are driven by goals and and and so a strategy and so the reason people are listening to this is because they see this as somewhat relevant to the goals that they're trying to set or pursue otherwise they wouldn't be here and so yeah people people think very tactically first and i think that the world's taught us to think tactically in terms of productivity and time management and even things like habits but all of those things are fundamentally secondary to psychology and strategy but are there any other ideas that somebody should implement as they raise their floor and remove some of these relationships in their business or remove some of the activities they're doing is there any other framework on how they think through new ideas that they should or new ideas they should bring into their business like when they look at their future version of themselves fine you wanna make ten million dollars in three years great but there's a million in one ways to achieve that up so how do you without going through every single tactic strategy customer type new product that you can bring to market how do you figure out what would be the quickest path to actually get there because we said we wanna get there in three years but now we have unlimited things that we can take on and that can also sort of be a distraction shiny objects syndrome we don't know where to spend our time on going forward so how do we how do we rank some of these opportunities or ideas the beautiful part about framing the goal properly back to john a goal properly said it's halfway reached is that if you set the goal properly most of the options disappear you don't have infinite options to go from one million to ten million in three years you actually have very few and so you have infinite options to get from one million to two million you don't have infinite options to get to ten x in two or three years or more most paths won't work that's why the framing is so powerful is because it forces out dead ends it forces you to be honest that most of what you're doing won't work it forces you to find better paths and better solutions that you wouldn't be looking for there's a very few paths to massive growth there's infinite paths to small and linear growth and so it forces you to find the best path the best model the best team the best people if you're really rigorous and honest about it i'll give an example and i share it in the book but you know one of the ladies that we worked with her name is alicia alt and she had a software company called level up score and she she was in the credit industry she'd been a coach for twenty years in the credit industry and she had built a software not her but she had hired someone and i i had a partnered with someone who built a software that she thought was incredible and she wanted to get that software into the credit industry and in the us the credit industry there's fifty thousand credit repair companies in the us alone people you can hire to help you dispute claims or raise credit and so she wanted to have those fifty thousand companies using her software with their clients because it was very valuable at helping them along that pathway and anyways so she began cold calling those credit repair companies and every sign every time she talked them they fell in love with the product and they said yes and so over a ninety day period of time this was in q one of last year twenty twenty four over ninety days she had ten of these calls created a deal where these ten different companies were using her herself software and they had a a little bit of a rev share well she met us and we said alicia we want you to set an impossible goals so that you can actually start to scale this company because right now you're on a path that's gonna take you twenty years to make a lot of progress and she said okay i'm gonna go for a hundred of these companies she was at ten i'm gonna go for a hundred of these companies using the software in ninety days and obviously that was a stretch that's a ten x in ninety days but it was still not a new model that made her old model or her old thinking obsolete right and so she figured even though she was really busy she had a full time job as a coach she also had kids she figured she could squeeze in over the weekends and stuff even though it was still lying to herself there's no way she could fit in ninety of those hour long calls she was already booked the gale her plate was already full but she was lying to herself and she thought i can maybe have ninety of these calls and so we said alicia your thinking is bad and it's gonna hurt you and it's gonna it's not gonna work and so i said we need you need a bigger goal so that you can find a better path and so she said it's so that that's what's interesting about what i'm talking about is by actually setting a a more impossible goal she found a more streamlined path what happened was she she said okay i'm gonna go for a thousand of these credit repair companies using my software in ninety days and she said as soon as i said that goal like my mind went completely blank i had no clue how to do it like and that's exactly where we wanted her and so and then and so essentially a big part of what we call pathways is thinking in psychology is thinking from the goal you always wanna think from the not toward the goal rather than thinking oh here's business model you know business model x y and z maybe i should pursue all those now let's set the right goal and from the goal let's start to develop a a model and a path and so for her from to get a thousand software or a thousand of these credit repair companies using her software in ninety days she realized she had no clue how to do it and so she began just thinking from the goal what are some possible pathways to do it and ultimately what came to her and this is one thing that people don't do i i spent a lot of time advising business owners and even when i'm sitting on a call like i'm on with you and i asked them to do something that takes them thirty seconds of thinking and literally thirty seconds of quiet they don't do it and almost every time when i say i'm gonna sit here quietly and i want you to just think about it for thirty or sixty seconds it's hilarious they start getting answers like literally people start coming to their minds and stuff but they won't do that and and so i forced them to do it but in the case of alicia she sat for literally three hours she journal about it and thought how could i get to a thousand and ninety days and the idea that came to her mind again thinking from the goal and giving herself space for meditation prayer journal if she realized there's already software companies in my industry that serve thousands or even tens of thousands of these credit repair companies if i just partnered with even one of these i could probably have over a thousand of these companies using my software she never had that thought it was completely different from what she had been thinking before and so ultimately within a week she was having a conversation with a guy who owned a company called credit repair junkie he had a software that helped these fifty thousand clients with their client experience and he actually had eight thousand clients using his software these credit repair companies eight thousand of them she explained to him level up score her her product he fell in love with it they formed a partnership he white labeled it and she went from ten of these software or ten of these companies to eight thousand from one partnership literally from one partnership but she would have never gotten there on her old thinking on her pathways and so she had to go from a different the goal took her down a different path and to different partners and the different people and it took her you know that that that strategy is thinking differently that's so powerful because yes i think the it's so funny so the average person listening to this they're they're so crazy that they they would for a moment pause and think how do i make a hundred calls in twenty five hundred thousand or a thousand hour yeah i'm well i'm gonna make a thousand calls over the next ninety days okay so that's ten a day you know like what else you know you got a full time job you got kids how you gonna do that they try to ten the current path rather than taking a ten x goal and finding a better path so take these so wild so incredibly insane that it's now impossible so now you gotta figure it out and i think that listen remember the goal is just a tool it's just a model for disrupting your existing thinking peter dr said this fifty years ago it's just a tool it's not something to get emotional about it's a tool for analyzing your present your paths and looking i i did this just barely you're you what's what so i was scheduled to be honest with you to do fifty i was actually scheduled to do about seventy podcasts this year oh my god and guess what i literally just un schedule all of them but five one of them was yours because you're a great podcast but like the reason i let those go is because i i wasn't dumb if you talked to me thirty days ago i was do podcasts and i was gonna do a lot of keynote and those were related to my old type of thinking to spread a book right i have this new book called besides is scaling out but when you begin operating from a much bigger goal and when you start bringing on what we call super who's super who's or people that can make the ten goal possible they bring capability and knowledge and they bring pathways with them that you didn't have before so in our case you know because our goal in scaling dot com is to have five thousand members and you know to be helping five thousand companies scale the easiest pathway for us to get there is to have a million people read our book or less right or or it doesn't have to be million it could be a couple hundred thousand but because of a guy who we brought on to our team joseph win he he wrote a book called don't believe everything you think he's he's self published he sold millions of copies he's a genius we brought him he's got phenomenal marketing capability he taught us things that are gonna make it ten times easier for us to get our book out there such that i don't need to go on podcasts or do keynote like i thought i did we have a far more leveraged path because of the people we've brought on our team and so our goal is gonna be a lot easier to get to plus it forces me to start letting go of the pathways i thought were relevant and so literally last week i was digging in a event and i realized half of my schedule for the rest of this year is a waste of time it's it's below the floor not that doing podcast is awesome but for me and for my goal i can't actually spend the majority of my time doing podcast we actually have already developed a better pathway because of joseph on our team where we can actually reach ten x the audience how to x the audience without me doing podcasts so now i have to let that go which is hard and i've gotta go think about where is a better use of my focus right because the model is frame floor focus and so the question is where is the most important thing to focus on to hit my goal or to to move the needle and i gotta be honest that at least half of my year was gonna be focused on the wrong things and so the willingness to let go of old pathways or to even let of old goals you know i used to have the goal of selling millions of copies of the books that's no longer a relevant goal that's optimizing the wrong thing for me and for my higher and better goals that allows me then to focus the system in a different direction and make better decisions and people often don't wanna let go of goals i think also because people will lie to themselves and say that the goals are serving their business objectives but i think more often than not just serving their ego you're so right you're so right they want that new york times seller or they want to have been on that show or they want to have x y and z and and those are optimizing things that shouldn't exist and and those are actually optimizing things that are counter to their goal and they hold them back they literally hold them back is there anything that you've seen as a major indicator of lack of alignment in someone's life like when you think about burnout or you think about i don't know like some people talk about how they always get sick and they're always tired or they're just they have so much anxiety or depression or they just hate the work they're doing like what's the signal that you need to really shake up your life and and start to apply some of these ideas i think you should anyways but people always it's so funny people always sort of ignore what they have to do until usually usually something happens and i'm curious what that thing is when you talk to these as business owners why did they reach out to you finally after x amount of years of not listening to your advice you're absolutely right that people don't raise the floor though they raise their floor as they wait as long as they possibly can't to raise their floor whether that means on bad habits whether that means on staying in a bad job whether that means on keeping a bad employee whether that means you know again back to the guy i talked to this morning he said that the biggest thing he did in the last thirty days was literally like oh of someone who's been on his team for for for for ten years even though like it's been five years too long and now his system has been built around this this bad actor and and now it's gonna be a long cleanup because he waited too long so the it's pretty obvious when someone is out of alignment when they're when they're not growing very fast to be honest with you like when when someone's not growing fast there's something wrong what you know whether they're in a business and it's growing it you know less than fifty percent a year there's something wrong i'll be honest with you like it if there's there's something wrong they're either caught in the weeds they're doing to many different things they're distracted they're optimizing the wrong things in a person's personal life again if they're not growing quite fast and quite well then they're they're stuck either in you know past patterns sunk cost bias as you've already said fear of failure not getting connected to a better future self and so the the most obvious thing is just if a person's stagnant frankly if a business if a person or a business is stagnant there's fundamental reasons why and you know back to the quote you can't change it by fighting the existing system right you can't just you know power or or or force your way out you you need a new and better model that forces you to really start letting go of your old model including mental models your old identity your old way of thinking but also face the face the grips that you're on a dead end path you're just not willing to admit it yet and the sooner you admit it and get off that path and get on a better path right you know guy kawasaki was on a bad path like he was on a path that was that was not optimal and he found a better vehicle a better pathway to equal the result if not better the result plus tons of other benefits and so but he had to let go of that path including the identity and the dopamine of him being the one of the top speakers etcetera and he had to let like let go of all that and you know it's the same with the two hundred thousand dollar a year lawn kirk person if they wanna let you know they're on their own version of guys guys you know hard path versus a much easier and a better and a more scalable path but they're gonna have to let go of the current path and model to go find the better and more more aggressive one and then they're there they're all over the place again it's called pathway syncing the problem for most people is they don't have a goal that forces them to go find that path and so they just stay stagnant fear holds people back do you believe that there is a fear element in pursuing impossible goals do you feel like there's fear of you mentioned maybe fear of failure is there a fear of becoming somebody who you don't want to become like is there a fear element that you encounter when you when you speak to some of the people that come and approach you and wanna work with you absolutely yeah i no absolutely fears is a fears a big thing that holds people back even from small things like saying hi to a stranger right so yeah but the fears are just misplaced they're missed they're mis reframe a lot of it comes down to two types of one is what if i don't hit the goal right and so then they feel like a failure or they they define themselves as a failure even though the goal is simply a tool to make better decisions i i myself don't think it's useful to overly attach to your your identity to the achievement of a goal i i don't think that that's useful but but the goal is a powerful tool for shaping your focus direction and the and the pathway you take such as guy with the better path but the the second fear that kicks in is that they don't know how to do it and they and they do know how to do what they're currently doing right they know how to that that that that lawn care company knows how to get two hundred a year revenue they don't know what it's gonna take or who it's gonna take to hire they don't know the path to get to to the next ten x jump or whatever and and they also know that in order to go figure that path out they're gonna have to raise their floor and start letting go of a lot of what they're now doing and they're afraid of the consequences of that both socially and economically they're afraid because that they don't know how they're gonna make it and and and and and and so they don't give themselves the the time of the energy to actually start solving the new goal which when i gave you the alicia example of getting to thousands of software you know thousands of people using our software or i give you an example of people just don't even give themselves thirty or sixty seconds to think about it right people don't realize that solving the goal isn't as complex they think they just don't actually solve it and they just anxiously fear and stay on their path and months go by and years ago by and they never really actually spent the time to actually solve the goal go ask people questions about it actually learn and figure it out you know what i have found in my own self is every time i've made a big big jump in my life and gone in a different direction than what i was previously doing for a much bigger future there is a challenging couple months or a year or even that goes by of uncertainty and not and if you're not sure if you'll be able to pull it off to be honest with you and a lot of people don't wanna deal with that that few months of that year and so they just don't do it and so they stand on their their path and they've just chosen their fate that they've reached their peak they've reached a lower peak and even though they didn't have to do that but what i have found in myself as well as advising others is that if you actually do make the commitment and if you actually start to really work on it you will like you will figure it out like it's figure out you know to to the idea of that quote it it it it will not it it might look a little different it might look scrappy for a while but you can figure it out and find it and going through those processes is somewhat what they call the hero's journey you know it's it's it's it's how you evolve to a higher plane and and and it's only for people who are willing to go through that process and and and very high levels of of achievement and becoming and meaning and purpose victor frank back to him said that you know what man needs is not attention less state but this striving and struggling for a worthy goal a freely chosen task right so that's how you get meaning that's how you get purpose that's how you stretch and grow that's how you experience significance and yeah does it sometimes mean does it mean sometimes go through some dark tunnels yeah where do you want people to connect with you where do you wanna send them for the books totals all that yeah no need for socials i would just say scaling dot com forward slash audio we've gotten permission from the publisher to give the audiobook away obviously if you wanna just read the physical copy go go grab it on amazon but forth a scaling dot com forward slash audio you can give you can listen to the entire book for free we actually wanna give away a million copies and so feel free to share that as a widely and abundantly as you want we don't care we we just want people able to listen to it or read it you've given over a lot but if you could pass on one lesson to your kids all seven of them one of the more important lessons that you've learned over your life that you think would maybe it's been a hard lesson that you wouldn't want someone else to learn or maybe just something that you think is one of the more impactful ideas that's change change your life or your outlook but would that lesson be you'd wanna pass on to them in why yeah so i think it really comes down to as people our future and the view we have of our future is what shapes who we are in the present right that includes your future yourself that includes your view of god and so you know in victor frank literally taught the same thing it was his core thesis and man search for meaning that you know people what what human beings need is is a future and a goal and where i see people struggles is when they stop having a big meaningful goal that stretches them and and forces them to grow and so your future is what shapes your present and that also includes your view of god obviously the life things like that like those things shape who you are now and so getting really good at understanding what that means and then living in alignment with it usually that's gonna lead to good things monarch money is a success story partner now you know what it's weird i'm doing well financially but i have this constant low level financial anxiety that i was missing something because i have crypto on all these different exchanges i have multiple investment accounts old four zero one k's savings scattered everywhere i knew the pieces were fine but i had no idea if the whole picture made sense i finally got monarch money to pull everything into one view and the first thing i noticed i had ten thousand dollars sitting in a temporary savings account from eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars it could have been workings that have just waiting for me to remember it existed also it showed me that i was spending tons monthly on all these subscription services that i couldn't even remember i signed up for every sunday morning it takes me five minutes to check everything all my financial stuff in one place no more wondering no more anxiety the wall street journal just named it the best budgeting app of twenty twenty five but honestly it's more about finally having control so don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks use code success at monarch money dot com in your browser for half off your first year that's fifty percent off your first year at monarch money dot com with code success success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me you there

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there in this lessons episode we're talking about the math that nobody wants to do how much time you actually have left with the people that you love if you've been telling yourself there's always next year to visit your parents if you assume you have decades left when you might only have a dozen visits if you've let geography or busy schedules make all of your relationship decisions for you this one's for you i'll show you why you've already spent ninety percent of the time you will ever spend with your parents but the actual numbers look like when you do the math and how to make conscious choices about how you spend time with your loved ones so when you do spend time with them you can be intentional fully there and just present you wanna hear something messed up by the time you're thirty five you're gonna have experienced ninety percent plus of the total time that you will ever have with most people who actually matter to you let me explain how this math makes sense last week i was interviewing a ceo from my podcast when we got onto the topic of work life balance and i mentioned something that i'd read from tim urban he's a blogger once you move out of your parents house you've already spent about ninety percent of the total time that you'll ever spend with them and my guess the ceo he stopped mid sentence he's like that can't be right so we did the math together his parents were seventy four he was forty seven he saw them every other month for a weekend and after pulling out his calculator he went pale forty eight that's the number forty eight he figured out on his calculator if he was lucky you would have forty eight more visits with his parents before they passed away and we finished up the interview he canceled everything that he had on that afternoon and he drove straight to his parents house and we were texting later that evening and he texted me a photo from his parents dining room and he said i just drove three hours to see them it was worth it now let's talk about how this calculation actually works so i just said ninety percent of your time is gone sounds like clickbait but the math is actually surprisingly straightforward and scary let's say you're thirty five and your parents are seventy years old so for the first eighteen years of your life from being born to eighteen years old you lived with your parents right so even if we conservatively estimate that you spent just three hours of quality time together per day say meals conversations homework help driving places that's about one thousand ninety five hours per year over eighteen years that's nineteen thousand seven hundred and ten hours and to be honest three hours is probably low you think about weekends number vacations family trips the real number is probably much higher after you moved out if you're like most people this was the dramatic shift right so college met seeing them on breaks maybe sixty days a year at first and then you got a job then you met someone and then you had kids of your own so now you see them what like once a month if you live nearby every few months if you're across the country and let's be generous and say it's ten days per year total holidays birthdays occasional visits and during those visits between work calls and managing your own kids and the general chaos of life maybe you get six hours of real quality time per day that's sixty hours per year and if your parents lift eighty five fifteen more years that's nine hundred hours remaining so that means that your total lifetime hours are twenty thousand six hundred and ten hours with your parents you've already spent nineteen thousand seven hundred and ten hours with them so the percentage that you've already used is ninety five point six percent now these numbers are gonna vary based on your situation maybe you call every day maybe you live next door maybe you're estranged but for most people who've have moved away from home the pattern is identical the vast majority of time with your parents happens in the first eighteen years now when i first speak about this math people push back right away and the responses are very predictable right but i talk to my mom every day or we're closer now than when i was a teenager or quality matters is more than quantity all true and all missing the point a daily phone call is wonderful it maintains a connection the emotional intimacy a shared life but a ten minute call isn't the same as living in the same house it's not breakfast together before school it's not teaching you how to drive it's not falling asleep on the couch watching movies see the relationship might be better now many people grow closer to their parents as adults but closer doesn't mean more time you can have a deeper relationship with less actual contact in fact that's what most of us have but you still have less time with them now here's something that i actually didn't understand until very recently time moves differently depending on where you are in life so this is also something that is a little bit scary to think about when you're ten a year is ten percent of your entire existence so summer vacation feels endless and the school near it drags on forever because again it's such a significant amount of your existence when you're forty a year is two point five percent of your life so you blink and your kid went from crawling the kindergarten but here's the cruel part while time speeds up for you it's racing for your parents so your mom is seventy the next five years represent a huge chunk of her remaining life her health could change her memory could fade her energy is definitely gonna decline now you're forty so the next five years you barely noticed them past your life is busy full demanding you are in the thick of career and kids and mortgage payments and this as creates its very painful gap the years when your parents need you most their seventies and their eighties are the exact years when you're busiest with your own life and there's another problem on top of this time as let's talk about geography in nineteen forty ninety percent of americans died in the same state where they were born today that's less than sixty percent we're more mobile than ever and that mobility has a cost that we don't usually calculate so if you live next door to your parents which is becoming increasingly rare you might see them multiple times per week right like quick dinners weekend coffees they watch the kids say call it a hundred plus days per year of contact which would mean you get a lot more time than that math i just did if you live in the same city thirty minutes away that means weekly dinners become bi weekly monthly becomes every month and you're down to forty fifty days per year if you live in a different city maybe say a two hour drive well now it requires planning right so we can visit every month or two holidays maybe twenty to thirty days per year if you're in a different state and there's a flight required well everything becomes an event thanksgiving christmas may be a summer vacation and you're at ten to fifth days per year if you're diligent and if you're in a different country you might see them once or twice a year a week each time if you're lucky so each jump in distance roughly halves your contact once you need a plane ticket spontaneous visits disappear entirely and more and more people are living again not down the street from their parents now once you start to understand this framework you're gonna see it in all your relationships so your children you get about eighteen years of daily contact that is roughly six thousand five hundred and seventy days and after they move out if you see them weekly and you won't once they have their own families that's fifty two days a year you'll spend more time with them in their first five years than in the thirty years after they turn twenty but that could be healthy your kids need to build their own lives the reduction in time often correlates with their own growth into independence but just know that there will be less time to be aware of it and savor and be present with your siblings right you share eighteen years under one roof probably annoying each other daily and then everyone scatter holiday gatherings weddings maybe a shared vacation the siblings you fought with every day become someone who you see ten times a year and then sometimes that distance improves a relationship you become friends instead of forced screw roommates but again just be present when you have that time with them all friends right four years of basically living together every meal is shared every stupid decision made together at two am and then graduation hits and you'll scatter to different cities in different careers and different lives and then group chat stays active but the actual gatherings twice a year if you're exceptional i planning and then the work friends right you spend more waking hours with colleagues and family five days a week eight eight hours a day for years and then someone gets a new job and then you never see them for the rest of your life right that person who you ate lunch with two hundred times a year become someone who maybe you text them on their birthday and this isn't meant to be tragic it's just meant to be something you're aware of some relationships are meant to be intense but temporary others are meant to be occasional but permanent the problem is we don't usually choose consciously we just let geography and circumstance and time and life decide and i think it's just really important to be purposeful and to understand that when you're with somebody be with them be present because there's a chance that that's gonna be the last time that you're with that person or at the very least the last time where you spend as much time with that person now i've shared this idea with hundreds of podcast guests thousands of newsletter readers friends family and the response falls into very predictable categories right so there's sort of four ways to respond to this information because it is heavy information group one denies it right about thirty percent of people say well this is too depressing to think about they change nothing they are the same people who don't look at their credit card statements and then they wonder why they're in debt second group of people is panic right about fifteen percent of people panic right i need to quit my job move back home right and they make these dramatic unsustainable changes and they last for about three months for reality sets in because you can't actually pause your entire life and your parents don't want you to group three third group is guilt about forty percent of people feel guilty as hell i'm a terrible son and daughter and they spiral into this self rec elimination but they don't actually change anything they just feel bad every time they see their parents which makes them wanna visit less which makes them feel worse and the last group is adjustment about fifteen percent of people actually understand what this means and they're more intentional with the time they have with the people that they love and they make these small very specific sustainable changes and the fourth group this adjustment group it interests me most this is how i think most people should react to the information that they only have a finite amount of time with the people that they actually love left so what does this group do they schedule regular calls and they treat them as un unbelievable appointments not just oh hopefully we jump on a call this week know it is something that is set and stone they put their phones away during visits completely away not just face down they plan regular trips instead of vague we should get together trips they say yes to invitations that normally skip they ask more questions especially about the past they show interest set in the people who they love they record conversations they take more photos they save voice mails and they move closer not next door but maybe from a plane ride to a car ride and they include their parents in their life instead of just visiting their parents life small changes but when you only have nine hundred hours left an extra phone call per week that's twenty six hours per year is nearly three percent of your remaining time now if you really wanna feel the weight of these numbers go visit a nursing home this is what you're gonna hear you're gonna hear things like my son lives twenty minutes away i see him on christmas or my daughter is very busy very important job i understand or the grandkids probably don't remember me it's been a few years and the saddest part is the adult children probably think they're doing well they usually think they're doing well if you ask these people in the nursing home if you ask their kids you know how is their relationship with their parents they're gonna say things like i call every month or i visit on holidays every month holidays to someone but maybe twenty months left right and if you do the math i broke this down for somebody in my grandma's nursing home and a resident actually did the math for me she said i have maybe five hundred days left my daughter visits four times a year that's maybe ten more visits ten more times i'll see my only child before i die and she thinks she's doing great because she calls on my birthday i'm not telling you these numbers or asking you to do this math so you can be sad and depressed i'm not telling you to quit your job and move back to your hometown i'm not saying you should feel guilty about living your own life i'm not even saying you need to change anything so some people genuinely need distance from their families and some relationships are toxic some parents were absent some parents were abusive some families function better with space if that's you the math doesn't apply the same way and that's okay but if you have parents who you love and who love you and you're operating under the assumption that there's always next year well maybe there is but not as many years as you think to the question shouldn't be how do i maximize every relationship question is am i making conscious choices about how i spend my time or am i letting life make those choices for me so if you're listening to this and this is concerning to you here's a few practical things that actually work after years of conversations about this topic these are some changes you can make in your life that people actually stick with so the sunday call pick a time every week same time don't negotiate with yourself don't skip it when you're busy especially don't skip it when you're busy monthly visit if you live within driving distance again kinda like the call pick a day first saturday last sunday whatever make it recurring the regular matters more than the frequency the grand kid facetime if you have kids and distant parents set up a weekly video call same time every week even if it's just ten minutes your parents don't care if the kids are crank here if the house is a mess also you can do a question project so every time you visit ask about something specific from the past record the answer you can say things like tell me about your first job how did you meet your best friend what was your dad like these stories disappear when people die and also shared activity find something to do together watch the same tv show and discuss it read the same book follow the same sports team share something beyond just updates about your life and the preemptive yes when they invite you to something default to yes instead of no you can always cancel if you really need to but starting with yes changes the dynamic so after listening to this i want you to try something i want you to pick one relationship that really matters to you and be specific could be your parent your sister brother doesn't matter how old are they right now and how often do you see them and be honest how many hours do you visit when you actually connect and then based on average life expectancy how many years do they have left and then multiply visits per year times remaining years and that's your number write it down the actual number not the lots of time left but write down approximately seventy three more visits if that's your number and then ask yourself am i okay with this if yes good now you know you've made a conscious choice if no then what specifically are you going to do to change it's not spend more time together but it could be visit monthly instead of quarterly or it could be call weekly instead of monthly or it could be moved to the same city by next year the vague intentions don't change anything but knowing you seventy three visits instead of decades that might change something so this leads us to the truth that really nobody wants to talk about your parents also probably think about this more than you do they're doing their own math they know their friends are dying they feel that the bodies are changing they see their time horizon but they won't tell you they don't wanna guilt you they don't wanna be a burden they're proud of your busy life your important job your beautiful family so they wait for your calls and they cherish your visits and they pretend they're not disappointed when you cancel but you know what your mom's counting your dad's counting your grandma and grandpa artificial alive they're counting they're all counting look time is gonna pass either way the math is going to work out however it works out you can know the numbers or not know them but they're still there and they tick away in the background the difference is consciousness knowing that this might be one of only forty more christmas changes how you experience christmas knowing this might be one of only one hundred more phone calls changes how you handle the call it doesn't mean every interaction has to be profound it doesn't mean you need to cry every time you say goodbye it just means you're awake to what's happening because one day and this is the only guarantee in life one day it will be the last time the last visit the last call the last i love you and when that day comes you're either gonna think i'm so grateful for the time we had or you're gonna think i wish i'd known how little time there was the math doesn't care which one you choose but you will clock ticking either way at least now you know how fast success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every 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success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there back in the day when i started it wasn't many shops tattoos were mostly criminal culture a lot of gangs involved but when i got my neck tattoo i would get stopped on a subway by old ladies they're like oh you're gonna go to hell some artists paint on canvas others carved and stone mikhail anderson chose human skin as his medium from moscow streets to new york's art scene he transformed tattooing into a form of high art fusing realism geometry and surreal you have to take it slow i feel like i did mistakes when i was trying to jump into something to do a realistic portrait when i've never done one my perspective when i started there was no social media some mentors that i had they said your work is your business card anything you put out there it's your business i think the more kind of open minded and more things you know it it's easier to adjust them to pivot from one to another he creates work that doesn't just decorate it tells stories at first class tattoos he built more than a studio he built a sank where was where every line every shade every image is a transformation this is mi mikhail anderson being an artist you need to see the world the more art you see the better stuff you create if you made certain amount of money you not to put eggs in one bass if i think sometimes like little steps is even better steps forward in the long term it's gonna be better so tell me about being a tattoo artist in russia so back in the day when i started it wasn't many shops so was very few shops and tattoos were mostly criminal culture it was a lot of gangs involved but the tattoos it was biker culture and i mean there was a lot of beautiful tattoos but it's it was not recognized it's still not recognized as a job as a profession in the country so there's is no code for it so if you say your tattoo artist everybody looks like you like what really and then they try to they try to enforce actually a thing recently they are trying to put it as a medical procedure and make people do certification but it's it's so idea for tattooing it's like why but when i when i started it was like a taboo i remember when i i mean people had tattoos a lot of people do have tattoos there but i remember when i got my neck tattoo i forgot i was like two thousand and eight or something and i would get stopped on a subway by old ladies they're like oh you're gonna go to hell and like stuff like the just out of front of nowhere you're just taken a subway to commute and somebody will come to like be like what the fuck is that we're like who just put the green shit of your neck oh they're like oh it's tattoo out that's so why did you if it's obviously not part of russian culture like it is but it isn't at the same time it's like counter culture so i feel like the way you're describing it it sounds like when you started tattooing in russia it just sounds like russia was like maybe like twenty years behind the us in terms of like tattoo culture probably yes so then the question is what where did the passion for tattooing come from when it was you know what you grew up with was you know gangs and and all these other things that were kind of like affiliated with tattoos what made you want to sort of get into this industry and and build a career in it so after school i actually went to college for a graphic design and we had a lot of art classes but i was also i was hanging out with people they were riding motorcycles and we're into all this like heavy metal kind of to part of the culture rock culture but i was i was young but it was it was something that i don't know i was like my family was very strict and i remember when i first got a piercing i pierce my ear and i came home my mom was like my mom saw it right away when i came home it was probably ninth grade in school and she was like alright if you don't take it out you can just leave outside she like pack my shit did she put it outside and she was like you have to take it out but i was like but the other other people other guys have it in my school like why can't i have it but she was like no like you cannot have longer hair than this you cannot have for any piercing you did the exact opposite of everything your parents wanna do do you find that when you go to graphic design school are there things that you've actually learned from design school that really really help you in your job or a lot that you had to forget to become a good artist so we've actually had some stuff like marketing and we had a lot of things like business related but it was back in the day when there was no social media so we'll learn we'll learn things that do not apply to not with they whatever whatever we're doing but i think in general once you like if the school is good or if the college is good if you learn different aspects from different things i think the more kind of open minded and more things you know it's it's easier to adjust and to pivot from one to another because if they just teach you like a standard one thing and that's what you know and then when things break down and you just being stuck because you cannot adjust your brain to something else i think that's that's the thing but i mean i think nowadays or in general you have to learn by yourself on your own like you have to find what inspires you who inspire you and like i always tell it i even have a book but it's it's actually funny i've never even thought about it but i i always know in my head that the best way to learn something that somebody did is just to copy and i i always set it like the masters that painted like cara and stuff like that they would make their apprentice to copy their pieces or parts of their pieces and copy and copy over and over so they can figure it out how they did it and learn it and then once they have that base they can do something on their own is that how you like is that how you learn no but i i'm in in general like i think it really applies to a lot of things because i tell my apprentice is like if you have somebody you really admire as an artist i was like take a piece and just try to draw the same like exact the same i mean you first can trace and then you can try to put a paper there and try to copy it without tracing and once you're doing it you figure out it like you think what they thought when they created it and like you see the lines you see how they try to balance things and it kind of imprint in your brain and then you more the more you do the more you understand that style or how they did it i think it's like a good thing and the same with like anything video photography like find who who you like and who you admire and what inspires you and then try to copy or try to figure out why and how they did it i think it's like a good thing like it's so interesting when it comes to creativity because the first time you do anything creative it doesn't even matter how passionate that you are about it you're all it's always gonna suck like it will always suck like if you're a graphic designer or you're creating video content which is sort of my world or if you're writing or if you're actually drawing on someone's skin like the first i don't know i know but you can tell me if the first version of of you as a tattoo artist sucked it very unforgiving but i think that for most creative is the first version really is not great and the only way to get great is through just doing it again and again and again and again but you made a good point like when you're drawing on someone's skin you can't really do a duo over so how do you get the confidence as a tattoo artist to say okay i'm not just gonna be tracing and drawing on paper i'm gonna take my skill set and i'm actually gonna draw on someone's skin which is gonna be with them for the rest of their life like do you remember your first yeah ever tattoo yes i do yeah well i knew in my head that i cannot do anything complicated so i started and i forced my parenthesis to do same i started doing just black and then knowing that i can fill it with a black so i like any any designs when i started out with do black outline and make sure that i can fill inside the lines with a black two so it it's like symbols or something small but not not small because small you can still mess up the lines and they'll be crooked but like mostly like black symbols that you can do outline and then you can fill it with the black and then if the outline or crooked you can just fix the lines a little bit so i was i was doing that for a while until i moved to something and i was doing more like traditional or japanese for a little while too because you just do lines and the designs are pretty bold and big so it's it's easier than to do something intricate and complicated but yeah i mean you have to take it slow because i i feel like i did mistakes when i was trying to jump into something like to do a realistic portrait when i've never done one like if someone's face yeah yeah and then and we all see we we all see the those those turn into memes on social media yeah but that there was before social media i actually got i actually have a porch on my on my leg that i i la but it was like the guy shop was like i've never done a portrait but he did realistic stuff like roses animals and stuff like that and he was like can i practice on you so when you're in a tattoo sushi shop you're like why not this stupid idea but i mean now thank god we have synthetic skin and fake skin that you can actually practice with which doesn't fill exactly the same as a human skin but you can practice on it and you can figure out the way you approach things and your skill and then you can tattoo after on the skin on actual human skin but i make if i have an apprentice i make them tattoo a synthetic skin for a while if it's like complicated design so they can build into it but yeah it is like a tricky thing because when i first started when you try to move into something different and i feel like i got recognized on social media when i did something different with the tattooing because i was like oh let me actually do watercolor on the skin and that was that drew some attention like a lot of attention when i posted on social media because it was something different from most people and i was like oh i can do all these drips and like sp yeah as the color because tattoo before it's like what i have it's like should be lines as black lines and like stuff that is like structural right so you can see what it is but to put the color coming out of the lines and forming me like a drip or some whatever like a wash how you doing the watercolor paper not many people are doing it was like very few maybe two or three people and when i i was like let me do something i mean it's scary you try do some different but when you do it and then you post on social media it gets a lot of attention and you get a lot of attention people are like wow because it is different how did you know so taking back to like when you're first starting out in moscow and and still kinda taboo but obviously you you love what you do how did you know that tattooing was your calling how did you know that this is something that you wanted to do for the rest of your life was there a moment was it gradual was it when you came to the you like what was the thing that was like this is it i need to do this with the rest of my life i'm so passionate about this and i'm assuming it was difficult at the beginning to make money like money at beginning really difficult for a few years actually i think i was doing more money when i was doing graphic design and and i also did freelance graphic design i was making a lot because each single thing like a website or branding for for a company was like a thousand bucks that you make out of it and tattoos when when you started and there was no facebook or instagram or like social media it wasn't like you have to do a tattoo and then people only recommend you if they see it on somebody and people will come to or unless you have a website and then you cannot charge much money because you're just starting so i literally when i tie to the first half a year i think i ask people to cover supplies so i would just do something and just ask them to pay and cover supplies so literally from making decent money i went into sleeping on air mattress because i couldn't afford much but i don't know like i i really was drawn by like i've been around tattoo artist back then and my i had a lot of tattoo artist friends that tattooed and i just love the energy i love the people who did it it was like it was different from corporate well i was i my parents were try to push me to work in a corporate work for a company and i did work for a company for a little bit but i i wanted that freedom of like making art on people and hanging out with interesting people you know because it was always an tattoo shop so all kinds of people it's actors gangs drivers politicians all kinds of people in its stories it was it's really fun funny it was like almost a rock band on tour with with like just people come together get drunk or go play with a strike ball or something where like and then do order at the same time and everybody had stories everybody traveled around and i i don't know i was just drawn to it back then i didn't know that i i'm gonna do it for rest of my life i just i don't know i was really it was something different and i wanted to literally live inside a tattoo shop i feel like first few years when i worked at a shop i was there every day like twenty four seven i just wanted to be around people i wanted to see what they do how they do it and it was it was amazing i think can even after the shop was closed when i was here in florida would go hang out together and like skateboard and do some stuff like people from a shop it was like almost a community how do you define good work or a good tattoo like what is your litmus test for quality outside of it just not looking good guess we all we've all seen bad tattoos but what is your quality you're sort of gauge i mean i think a lot of aspects from it should be well done that it's gonna age well it should be placed correctly and be flow with the body because every single place is different than like for example i have certain parts of the arm when i twist it or when i bend it's gonna distort whatever i place there so if we put in a portrait or put in something we have to place that it's not gonna distort in a place that is visible and there's a lot of things that come to mind that i've learned for example if you're tattooing face and there's a shadow side and light side and your arm the same when the arm is completely down when the sun hits the arm this will be a light side and this will be a shadow side you don't wanna put a shadow side of a porch on the light side and put a light side up as way because anytime somebody's gonna wear the work is still natural light hits it that way and if if there is a shadow side and the light side is gonna look a little weird it's better when the shadow side where the arm shadow side is and then it it's it's like that it's little things that i don't know i don't keep in mind it's more natural because i've done it so many times but and i don't think about it physically but it those things make sense it's like art and whatever is in the world everything has laws and physics to it i think are these are these sort of universal art rules or are these more specific to tattoo i mean there's all universal art rules and like thinks as a color theory i think it applies to painting tattoos and all kinds of stuff but i i think tattoo looks good in my opinion that it's well designed it placed well and that it's gonna age well for at least ten years at least ten years and that and when you say a tattoos aging well i mean it's not fading it's not looking like how how old are the tattoos on on your arms because they look good everything's pretty old i mean those are probably eight years that's not bad for eight years yeah every everything like i lost time so i've got on my leg was in twenty twenty so i think if tattoo is done well it should look really good and i in my opinion a good tattoo should be once you go closer to a person it should look good but once you also step far away you should recognize what it is like if further than you are and i see what you have on your arm it shouldn't look like a mess i should see at least that it has some flow or what it is that you have that in my opinion is a good tattoo to when i was looking up some of your some of your past you had a test for quality and i'm curious if it still applies because you had mentioned that if you remove the color and it still works as black and white then that's a very good indicator of a good tattoo is that still the case yes especially especially for color tattoos i think the color tattoo should have value because a lot of people would tattoo to all these colors even if it's a flower for example they would attach to all these colors but it doesn't have enough contrast so there is not enough black or it doesn't even have to be black i have actually a rose on me and a guy didn't use any black on it i don't know why but the color theory and the color balance works so well that there is enough from the light tones to dark tones which i i think for any tattoo especially color sizes black and white do you see its values that are from black to your skin and a lot of black and gray people that tattoo black and gray they use the skin as the lightest tone and a black as the darkest tone so they use one the light tones are they just use your skin so it's a contrast like that but when people tattoo color some people make it look a little messy because they put if you turn it into black and white there's a lot of the same gray tone into the colors with not enough values to it so if you turn black and white it almost look like like a muted paper that put over like almost like well you have a carpet it's like all the same tones but they're are different colors they'll be red or blue or something else but they're all the same and it just doesn't have enough contrast so that's that's an indicator of a bed tie too in my opinion because if you look at a traditional there skin is left as a as a light tone and it's even if it's a one bold color but there is still skin between the line there's color contrast to yeah it gives it that huge contrast from color to the to the skin but a lot of people and they do real is more they do something with the colors they don't have it in their head they don't keep it in their head to be to keep those values so you you need to think like design you i like putting in a design and look in a mirror to see it flipped so i could see the issues when design is unbalanced because when you see it with your eyes you kind of once you're working on it you're used to what you see so much then if you go to the mirror it flips at it forces you to see it differently like it forces you to say it differently and it was actually interesting i was looking at some photographers and i think it was cartier saw us somebody with a big name he like was reviewing somebody's portfolio and the guy was describing he brought him photos and he just put the photos upside down and he just looks at photos and the guy was like why are you looking at photos upside down and he was like i'm just looking at light and balance with the shapes i'm i'm i'm not looking at photos is is in a normal way but i wanna see if it's all composition and balanced if it's upside down so it's like trick your eyes with you put something or you draw something on paper and you just go in a mirror and put in in front of the mirror and look at it and then you'll see mistakes or directional lines or tag on the lines or imbalance with like sometimes if there is too much on one side you have to balance it somewhere an opposite way so kind of has like a counter balance you things this is so interesting so i i've also what you're describing i've experienced in in a different context so it's almost like when you're a creative and you spent too much time on a piece mh and i write a lot so sometimes i've noticed that when i write say sam i'm writing on my on my laptop and and i wanna publish a piece i don't know if it's similar or different maybe it's the same mechanism in the brain but i'll actually read it on a different screen or on phone or on anywhere else or i'll read it the next day i'll read it somewhere else so that i can actually pay attention to the things that i for some reason when i'm actually creating it in that first the first version of it it's like your brain is trained to skip over the problems but if you find a way to consume it in another way mirror flipping it upside down sending it to yourself for me and like reading a a a piece on a on a phone as opposed to on a laptop all of a sudden your brain sees all these problems for the first time that there were always there you just couldn't see them so i think that that's an interesting thing as a creative because you get so involved in your work and i think that you're there must be some psychology reason why your brain passes over these flaws when you're staring right at them because you should see them but you don't and this is a way to force recognize the flaws in the work i think it's the it's the same like what what you said is the same on art and i think we basically we just get used to if we would see it the first time when there is mistakes it would it would bother yes us but if you give it to somebody and they would read it if they are professional in that field it would bother them like i i had people in a shop that work with me they usually especially people who did a apprenticeship with me and they work they would make a design and they kind of are like stuck with something and they bring it to me and me like just briefly seeing it i see all mistakes right the away and i was like just move this a little bit to the left and and make this a little bit bigger yeah that what you said i think it's exactly the same as like if you type it on a laptop you put on the phone and you read it from your phone or in a different environment you start seeing other mistakes or other things who who do you study because you've mentioned that you study painters not like modern painters you study renaissance painters traditional are who do you study that sort of in influences you teaches you and why as painters or i i guess well you you you tell me i mean do you study classical painters do you study renaissance artwork at do you study other tattoo artists like who is your i would say mentor that doesn't even know you exist who's the person that you study i like a couple tattoo artists that i always watch yes and i maybe they do know you exist but yeah yeah and i i think in in my world the thing is if you wanna see how somebody works just go and get tattooed by them it's like it's like the easiest thing is the same with probably you if you were to learn how somebody does a podcast just go and get up in the podcast with them and you'll see a whole exact setup you you'll see what they ask and how they approach things said this will be probably expensive but the quickest lesson for you because you don't have to sit and figure things out with the trial and error you go to somebody who is established and very good in their style and i guarantee you they did the same like i know people that are top they usually hang out around the top and they usually hang out around the people or hang out before or grew up together something else that do thinks really well in their style that's what it is you have to be you have to be around something like that because figuring things out by yourself it's gonna take years and i i think that's the that's the easiest way but i do study a lot of different things and i like to be diverse i don't wanna be stuck just in art and i've studied art history actually in college and i had to pass an exam on it from probably ai icon paintings and you know the interesting thing is like we have in a regular paintings we have perspective and we have to follow perspective in ai icon paintings the perspective goes in you in a in a viewer in their solar plaques so the eye icon paintings as considered after all these rock paintings when the people start painting religious stuff the all the perspective from the painting goes inside you as as yours the center and it's very interesting no what like a lot of people don't talk about it but it it is like that can you explain that because i wanna understand this so what do you mean by perspective so once you once you draw a cube right yes the the lines that is the the sides of the cube they go and they come together yes as a as a perspective because things as further they are they smaller and they go like this but when there is icons of like saying or something else if you look at the perspective their perspective goes into center of you as they would think that this is the solar plexus as the center of the universe so everything goes into you interesting yeah i've never not not a lot of people talk about it but it like i had to study class c art and from phases from to modern art to pop apart to all this stuff and know exactly was like around that like so this this particular college no no not not sorry i didn't mean when you study i mean meant this particular idea these would be paintings of like kings or religious leaders or things like that that would have this particular perspective yeah the perspective goes into you it's it it's it it's an interesting thing but then they switch to like how they see the world they would switch to the perspective as it goes like how we see with guys so you still i mean but when you study that when you said i first of all i think that art history is fascinating i don't know much i don't want know much about it compared to to you obviously but when you study that does that impact like how you do your work does it does do any of those themes actually crossover over into modern day or no yeah of course but i don't think i've had it in in that deep but i've actually spoke or watched some seminars of like modern days like oil painters when they describe certain things like if they take their renaissance painting and they just put it in photoshop and the same with the with that black and white that i say but they would turn in in black and white the painting and then they would push the contrast to the max as possible right and they would say hey look the light shape frames everything is light and connected and the dark is almost all connected as well so if you push it mh so certain things once you study you start to understand how the contrast work how the light works and stuff like that it definitely helps with the tattooing and modern day tattooing even in any style i think do you think that okay so this is now fast forward to all the we're chatting with this for we press record so now there's so many ai tools that help you create right yes and one the one issue with ai tools is of course for a graphic designer yes it could theory replace their job but you i made the comment for a tattoo artist i don't think that it's gonna be replacing your job anytime soon unless there is some sort of automated device that can draw art on a human body without a human holding the pan or the but i think that the bigger issue is that the amount of knowledge that you have i think that younger artist are gonna outsource a lot of that learning to to ai tools i don't like if for example if somebody wants a tattoo mh do you see a younger artist going on like a chat asking for a design they probably do and then yes can you trace that design but do they actually understand why that design is good i don't think that if they do that they'll know even a a fraction of what you just told me i think the artists should know basics and should know the art history and composition and how the light works because i we actually do tattoo to remove water photoshop and i just had it was actually funny the guy came in he just got a tattoo and it was a scorpio there was probably ai generated and it it's been for past maybe half a year two a year people would bring ai generated images as designs to get tattooed because they don't go on google and search hey i wanna a scorpio and find a photo of a scorpio they type on a chat gp a scorpio tattoo and a chat gp generates it but sometimes it generates it unrealistic so the guy came into on artist with the image and they tattooed it it was probably made in ai and one claw is different than another club on on image and then the guy got tattooed super clean super nice and then he came home he looked at it he started googling and he didn't find exact scorpion he's was like i've never seen scorpions it was like this i i and he was he came in and he he was like hey i just got tattooed yesterday it was not in my shop he was like i just got a tattoo yesterday he was like you i know you guys do laser he was like can we just laser at this clock and so like i mean like that yes so but the tattoo artist is still but like is it is there no i i i like maybe you're gonna say well there you know if the a client comes in with a drawing then we just do what the client wants but there has to be responsibility on the tattoo artists to be like okay maybe this isn't the best design yes it should be on everybody i feel like my perspective when i started it was no social media yeah and what i've been taught by mentors that i had they said your work is your business card you tattoo to and somebody if i walk around and you see this and you're like oh my god holy shit this is amazing you're gonna be like hey who did it and i was actually flying to here and i saw a lady in the airport with the tattoo and i knew who did the tattoo because some styles are recognizable and some people do specifically like i knew exactly who did her sleeve and the girl worked from you before i didn't say anything i didn't interact but yeah you go especially now when it's warm you go and you see something amazing you're like holy shit who did it even if you don't wanna get that tattoo but it might catch your interest so i think anything you you put out there especially tattoos because it's hard to erase it's your business card and my business card and if somebody comes in they're like hey this is an ai generated image or if there's especially with ai it has issues with hands i don't know why yeah like it's it's always six finger like so if somebody comes with the image and i'm i mean if i put it on somebody even if the person likes it what if other people gonna make fun of it and then the person just gonna have a trauma you know and because of what i did on them do you turn people away no i try to suggest to do something different i think it should be like a tattoo should be very good at psychology and they should be very well with the clients try to make them feel comfortable and understand if if there's something that needs to be bigger if something needs to be changed i think the client should see that perspective entire should take time and show them or have some examples and show like hey this is not gonna work because what you see online especially now with all this editing tools photoshop and all other stuff is sometimes it's not the same as what you see in person so a lot of people should be careful nowadays because things get adjusted and then i've seen had to artist even post their work that never been done and they just throw mike tyson portrait and cha put there can you do this as a tattoo chad gp generates the image and then they posted on their social media saying hey i just tattoo that and it looks it looks real unless you zoom in and you don't see the lines it's too it's too real to be true yeah like tattoo that's just far that's just fake yeah that gets fake but the for since the whole thing started with the ai some people were keep doing it and they get clients out of it but i i feel like more it goes on more people start and they start doing research because there's things like reddit and all all kinds of stuff when people post actual things and the more information is there or i would trust somebody like i said like i go to the gym and i somebody tattoo to and i'm like wow and it's healed and i'm like wow i wanna it's tattoo like that that's the person i would go to because i know i've seen something that i like and i want something similar instead of going into somebody's instagram and seeing all this pictures that they tie to but they can also use photoshop or ai generative tools to clean it up and do all kinds of stuff to it which i think is gonna turn more into stuff like that but i mean ai to be honest with you a great tool i feel like it helps to save times during the research so sometimes you need to put different things together and a client will come with like a huge concept and instead of just doing a research on your own and searching like some historical things i've had a client that came in and he was like i wanna have a battle that there's no photos or drawings from the battle from like between iron and german from like whatever world do war one and there is no no photos but he was like i on germans to wear when it was world war one but it which is was a small part somewhere that they fought in the same with the irish and i just through it in ai and ai help to like generate and it's good for research it's but certain things and the same with like creating a concept if you're saying some people will come and be like hey it won't like something as a mix like a sting gray floating in a outer space or whatever my i mean i can i can do it myself i've done things like that but i'm just saying for people that i having a hard time visualizing it or like you have an idea but you have a hard time you can type in me journey and in different versions and see what it generates and i've seen photographers do it for concepts they just say hey i want a photo of beautiful woman as a rain renaissance painting stand in front of the castle with like this and this and this and this yellow dress and just floating they they put all these tags and it creates the concept with the light even you don't like the light but you can take the concept and then you can go to a custom designer and say hey can you make me something similar inspired by this as a dress and then you look for locations you start looking and you look for the light similar inspired on that and then you create your own you don't have to copy anything that ai generates but it it helps it's a tool and the same with marketing i think like you can i was flying on the plane i see people type like what's the i don't know if the guy was doing some business and he was like typing what's the most unemployment states and he puts all these things together using an ai like super quick for his company and i was like well i mean do research by yourself using google and reading articles it's harder versus you type it there and it nets sweet is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if you ask nine experts you're gonna get ten answers bull market bear market interest rates are rising they're falling honestly at the end of the day we just need a crystal ball but until then over forty two thousand businesses have trusted and future proof themselves with nets sweet by oracle the number one cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory in hr into one cohesive platform with one unified business management suite there's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control that you need to make quick decisions with real time insights and forecasting you're peer into the future with actionable data and when you're 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you want faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs plus with indeed sponsor jobs there's no monthly subscription no long term contracts you only pay for results there's no need to wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash cla right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash cla terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need when did you start making money and also what was the thing that differentiated you or what was your what was the thing that you did that allowed you to make exceptionally more money at tattooing than the average artist so i feel like when i after probably a year year and a half i started making some money moscow in moscow yes probably two two about two years that i was being able to pay for my bills and put money in a savings and there was still no social media but i wanted to spend money as traveling that was my biggest goal because i feel like being an artist you need to see the world you need to experience things and the more how i said the more soul you are the more art you see the more different people from different countries you meet the better stuff you create so i was literally working to save the money to see other countries or go to other shops and learn live as much as possible and it was like my biggest goal and then i feel like i start making decent amount of money when i moved to from florida to new york actually because new york was a turning point when i moved to new york the instagram became as a thing and people start using instagram is posting their portfolio and building their clientele and it was basically when it just started but i remember a few times when it i got repo by big pub and i would get like ten thousand overnight just for tattoo i did and it was insane that i i did something different somebody repo it and all of a sudden my email is full i would get ten fifteen emails overnight and a day and it was it was like a a ball rolling you know once you once you do something different once you hear a point and you all of a sudden have all these bookings because when i was here in florida so you went you went moscow florida first that was the first spot that you landed after i mean i was in new york first i for me when i first started traveling i went to europe a lot i've been to europe so much to different resource but not living not not living i i've i've stayed in germany for like three months but i i've had friends there i've been to spain to finland to sweden norway all kinds of stuff but i came to new york first because for me was like oh it's come to states and buy supplies and see the shops it wasn't i didn't wanna stay here but i wanted to meet other artists and experienced things and see how the shops are because in russia shops were way different than here like here it was actually some shops in vegas or miami it was like a parlor where people already had ipads this portfolio it was tvs it was like a setup booth oh you said in russia wasn't even a business yeah for for each thing yeah and it was lines of people but it was because first i think miami inc brought a lot of attention to a thing and it was when it was on a national tv and then it was distributed to the world people side i think that draw a lot of attention and back when i was in florida florida actually miami was a number one city in the states or maybe in the world for the popularity of tattoo really yes i didn't know that so probably because of the show i'm assuming yes of the show and people who fly from south america we had people that would fly and when they got tattoo they're like oh my god it's like in miami show like so many people said their comment when i was tattooing them when you create something and like i watched the show but i i didn't watch everything because i didn't have time back then and when you're tattooing and they're like oh it's like he's doing almost like they did on a show and it it was like so interesting to see that but we had lines out of the door like i would make it was crazy because i would make like thousand dollars in tips back then and you were at this point this is not your own shop no i was working if you but you're like hustling all day and you work in the shops was open like first we're open till certain time and then they decided to even keep it open all night too and you're like slam with clients you're like six seven ten tattoos a day you keep doing it it was like tourists coming in people from all over the place which eventually overs saturated the market but because people saw opportunity how it is and then everybody start opening shops where money yeah yeah yeah and then it's it's like boom nobody has work everybody's is like oh what's going on but i mean i feel like new york was turning point from me you when i when i move there and one instagram became a popular thing especially for tattoo there was a tool almost photographers and and tattoo it's like a wall where you put your work and people can sc see or because website is one thing if somebody types tattoo artist in new york there's shit on a websites that pay pay for ads google ads ceo like all that kind of stuff that pop up and if you make a website even when you put the words there you're not gonna come up on the first three for five pages nobody's is gonna find you but instagram was like you post and you can get there from just one posting one work and i remember when i've had it was probably one work just made me like really a lot of clients overnight i've i've started getting emails because i did some different than people are doing there and it was it was like a bull rolling and it started and i i had to keep going with it you know when did you open your own chops so this was first class tattoo yeah the shop i opened in twenty sixteen i worked this was on canal street so when i when i first got the spot it was a cheaper rent because the area was basically all chinese stores and it was warehouses there and i was looking for area can that i can't afford myself even if nobody works for me if i work i can pay that rent a month and i still make money so that's why i got the shop there but then other people that own buildings they saw opportunity they're like oh the guy got a shop and there's people coming in and wealthy people coming in they were like instead of having their own store downstairs they're like i can rent this space to somebody else and they started renting space so it's almost became gen so you started the gen identification of canal street yeah pretty much so now that area is so much different that people who live there they know what i'm talking about people who just moved or never been to that area they don't they probably wouldn't say but i was one of the first businesses they changed it and also they built a hotel which was a place there was the first chinese bank which is a nine orchard but for first i think five six years it was still on the construction was all stuff there but now it's an open hotel and it's a lot of celebrities that come there and it's all like black cars and suvs all over around because like i bump into kylie jenner i by bump into jared let staying in the hotel it's all celebrities staying there and it's literally next door from us like literally next that's so funny so you you you so you were the first shop and then everything's ready the change and it it it became like people would see opportunity they would open a coffee shop here coffee shop i think four coffee shops opened in the last ten years literally and it it like floods the people there and people start renting spaces and this all good for every whole orchard street like a street when you walk from my shop before twenty twenty it was all like shady kind of small dirty stores because the whole area before it was jewish like city jews owned it and then they saw opportunity i've even had people like was come to me and they're like hey do you wanna open another we see how successful you are they almost wanted to sell me a building there in worcester they came in and they're like we'll we'll sell your building four a million dollars you can put whatever you want there because for them they would have their own store and they would rent apartments but it's a lot of work yeah but once if they rent it for somebody you have to take care of space you like take care of old maintenance and you tracked also a lot more and they don't have to do anything they just make money so they wanted like successful things so last four or five years all that stuff became like a completely different area than it was and i i feel like me and maybe that hotel kind of people saw the rent is cheaper because lower side was always more expensive rent i was looking for stuff there and when i when i went there i was like they started from ten grand and up ten years ago it was literally like ten grand for like small space and it would go up how much is it now i don't know we which in area where i had the store it was like five and up it was much cheaper but nobody wanted to rent there because there's nothing around because when i first signed a lease i would go and look for like a coffee tea i got to store it was literally a sign was in chinese i go inside and i was like can i get this and like no no no speak english and i was like okay i was like everywhere like that but now it's a completely different area but people who live there they would know what i'm talking about so i think sometimes you make something successful and like people around they see okay there's different class different people come in there and they're like maybe we can open businesses there too what so just to paint to picture people that are listening like again we're talking a lot about obviously tattoos and and the tattoo industry but as an entrepreneur so you you spent how many years before you actually started to build your own thing like how many years have you actually done the math like how long you were like working mastering your craft putting in the reps before you actually built something successfully that was your own almost ten years almost ten years not like nine years program yeah and when you did make that jump because now i know a little bit more because again we were talking about some of the other things that you you're you're working on you're actually very risk adverse so i think you're very smart you do things very thoughtfully which i think is probably why you're successful at it but when you start something new even like some of this stuff that you're working on right now like some of this sort of not side hustle so that's putting it lightly but like some of the other projects that you're working on you don't just you don't just completely forget about the main thing and then start something new you keep the main thing going and then you build something on the side kind of like and i'm curious how you actually started like your first shop you're working you're saving money you're learning and then you start the shop but you did it successfully so was it starting the shop while you're still working or did you save up a certain amount of money or did you understand how long it's gonna take you to be successful at building your own company and like that's how you sort of modeled out how much money you needed in the bank how did you actually start as this like that's the first time you're i was i was working yes yeah okay and i was building a shop as smart as i was building i start researching just how to name it the brand and all this stuff i mean now there's more tools as for for ai to do all that stuff but i was just doing that on my own and like thinking in my head what will be successful and doing a website and and the same time i was working literally like every day and i was looking for spaces i would meet the brokers in the morning look at spaces to see how much it cost and it was it was scary because i've had money in a bank i saved up probably a hundred k before i signed a lease and it it's not much money to open a business but for me when you when you work for somebody back then it was a lot of money and when i got the place i didn't even have like i had id in mind i put it kind of like i want black and gold there's like design inside and stuff like that because the broker also when they rent a commercial lease and you never had a physical store or something like that they're looking at you oh you're gonna rent you're gonna fail so they're like oh can you send us pdf of what the concept is gonna be what the colors are gonna be what in terms of like a business point though yeah like a whole business plan even if it's just a small store so i've had to do of that and i was tattooing in at the same time so it it was it was like that and then when i first signed the lease i've had people doing constructions with which was also bumps because i got a place and i was like what i'm actually gonna do with it because i i was like you know let me do a research and find somebody who can put a design together i mean i have a concept but i actually need a designer because if somebody wants to build they want to see references and stuff like that so i start calling people and they're like well we're gonna charge like forty fifty thousand dollars just to put a design together and rendering and i was like well it's was like half of the money i have was like no so like i asked the company that or signed me the place that gave me the lease i was like do know any construction workers so they gave me people and i was like okay talk to them what i want and i was trying to delay cosmetic things price was okay he was like i'm gonna charge you whatever five thousand a week or like something without the materials for labor and me because i was working and i wasn't there a whole time when he started doing it they took another two projects on a side and they they would just literally work there a little bit and go somewhere else and work there which few times i took a break from work and i went there and i noticed nobody's there so it turned into a whole issue i know i had to hire somebody else to do it because like those people they said oh we're gonna finish in a month or two whatever and they kept dragging it up to they they keep pushing and just doing like basic stuff that was taken forever because they took other two other jobs so i had to control that but i i found other people that would do it and then i started based on the concept i started just looking online what i can buy is in terms of furniture that would fit with a style because i was like i cannot afford somebody to put me like a list of what to buy and stuff together for like twenty thirty thousand dollars so you have to bring people over you you start doing the tattoos in your own shop now you're making a hundred percent of what they pay you which is great i don't what are the what are the normal splits like when you work in back when i worked it was fifty fifty now it turned more of like people doing forty sixty so gets paid the the artist paid more okay so we're like some shops in california new florida probably certain shops chair rental a month or certain shops are like seventy thirty seventy two artists and thirty to the shop but new york because of the expensive cost is very hard because here if i rent the space or buy space it's way less money than in new york for like for every every single thing for expenses but it is like a norm of like sixty forty split for sixty to the artist forty to the shop and i also had people in mind that i worked with before one guy was an apprentice and another was a friend of mine that came to states a few times and he said if i opened a business he'll come and join so i've had some people that had like an interest to come but it was mostly me just working and i remember when i first started a lot of things in terms of marketing was trial and error because like you have a store you you did a sign outside right but how to bring the people in like i put the google ads i put the money into i instagram reporter it almost yeah i put her in instagram and then certain things came as like nobody was doing videos and i customary challenge to me which was a videographer and she was like i wanna do a tattoo an exchange for a video and i was like sure and i was one of the first i think people first tattoo artists that ever posted a video of like a next show video not just to clip with the phone of like professional camera video shot on a professional cameras to to post of the whole tattoo shop in a process and it brought a lot of attention because the person i worked for before actually after i posted a video he got pissed he sent me a message because when i left he was like i'm happy for you like you did your own blah blah but when i did a video and got a lot of attention on social media he sent me an angry message he was like i'll fuck you like blah blah because nobody did it before and know i was the first person whoever did he ever try and sue you for anything no oh they actually stole an artist for me that was my apprentice but it's okay what was sort of like the the lowest moment or the one thing that was really something you had to go through as an entrepreneur that you hope nobody else would ever have to go through when you're building your shock i think the first worst moment when i actually had a few people working for me and the manager that was probably a really like a best manager but they started bit building a business outside of my business but like what i did to somebody that i worked before they had a much bigger business that i have and when i left it didn't affect them but for me like if i hire three people and three people leave and there's only four people working for me that was like a big thing because they took a whole client base and they did that yeah and they and went and open a space and took the best manager out of three managers i had they took a general manager and they took them to work for them because they offered her commission or something more money that i was paying her and it was really that was like one of the first painful thing that happened to me and then certain other things like i hate to bring it up but i've had it happened multiple times when people make relationships inside the business like i would hire it was like multiple people working and they're like nine people but then somebody is like start dating somebody and then potentially turn into a drama which few times happened there was like always a red flag for me always always an issue and then i feel like another thing we don't see ourselves from the outside right but if i would come here and i would would be wearing like a medical stuff you would assume i'm a doctor right it's like called power of authority so once you become somebody if i'm a boss people take me in a different way so i felt like when i've had a few celebrity clients and i got a little bit of popularity some people come into the life just to try to use you but you don't see that way because you don't like i haven't had experience with that before like everybody that i consider that was wants to hang out or talk like personal things i consider as a friend but people are trying to use just to gain something for their personal stuff for their interest so it's a lot of those and i feel like my my last marriage was the same too because the i mean it's sad to say but the person came in into the life one was working for somebody and like i build build the person up and shi learn so much from me and is doing same things that's what i thought you heard like that's what i see through all the post even if after it we're broken up and all that stuff i'm sorry it's okay but it's like i've never experienced that in you i guess you learn a hard way with like walking with somebody that presents themselves as a different person they but they just try to use you in their advantages just to kind of i think it happens whenever you start to like build a little bit of fame or notoriety or you hang at with cool people it's weird it's a weird feeling i mean it's a very like listen it it usually means that you're very fortunate and that you've you know you've built a a great you've built something that people actually admire because if not they wouldn't try and use you i noticed that sometimes with the podcast too because i i get to interview some very cool people yeah so you just have to you know you just have to make sure that friendships are like honest and they're actually friends and yeah but i i i i totally understand where you're coming from no but you i think you need to be like i've had like i didn't have experience with it but now i haven't and i look at things and nobody has experience that before the first time they have it yeah like nobody has the experience to somebody using them before it happens the first time you're for sure now fast forward to to sort of where you're at now what are you doing to reinvent yourself now like what are you excited about what are you working on what are you sort of outside of just running the actual shop which is still obviously killing it but how do you keep reinventing so that you stay relevant you stay new you stay exciting well at the moment i'm basically i try to build a new business because i feel like and it's been always on my mind too when i've i've heard some people speak they say don't put all eggs in one basket and stuff like that i think entrepreneurship as a thing it comes to like this is the only country i think in the world where you can be financially free and you can build that as your future like you can make enough money that you can buy real estate or invest money somewhere where the money is can eventually be working for you and that's that's building them true well that's the ultimate goal and people that don't understand it they probably working for somebody or i mean you can work for somebody but i think in the future what what changed my mind when i said before about the surgery and stuff when you don't work you need something that work for you because everything costs money everything is expensive anywhere you go like now in new york you go outside a hundred bucks is gone or or like three hundred miami is how much better either yeah yeah and if you just exchange in your hours into the money but what if you cannot what if something happens if you get sick or your disabled you got a car accident which happened to like i hear stories like that because i a lot of clients and clients are like hey i just gotten car accident and i i cannot hear like my i'm paralyzed there's something else but if you're just working a job at a computer writing something or doing something changing your hours for the money what if you cannot do that tomorrow i think this is like every everybody should learn and figure out how to make money outside of their job and figure out where they can invest at where they can do when the money is working for them and i've been even before open a business i've been i've had an an an idea that don't put eggs in one basket you need to have different sources of income and i have a little source of like a real estate and stuff like that where i put the money and it's passive income i don't put much unless something happens if a major thing happens like the roofs laid off of a house and something else like you need to put a lot of money into but you actually you own real like you've purchased real estate you get somebody to manage it for you no i do myself but but it's better to get somebody managed like the ultimate goal to automate things that work for you that you don't have to work and that's like i think a lot of people should think that way and the same with like the industry if something is hot if you made something successful you cannot just be stuck with it because in five years or four years the economy can change people's mind can change everything so dynamic that when i said in the beginning i said when i started marketing there was no social media and we started marketing is like doing a research sending mail or putting putting things as billboard and putting things on a billboard that's why it we learn but now it's completely different completely different animal and i think grown yourself in different directions helps with the business helps with a being diverse because sometimes like you literally have to pivot like companies think about company like nokia it was a huge company with the phones but why they don't make phones anymore where where the phones because iphone took over because they didn't wanna adopt and create something different because maybe was too much structure in a company and they couldn't agree too slow yeah moved too slow whatever but billion dollars companies just like sometimes they vanish blockbuster as so many things i mean you can bring up so many things like that but you have to pivot and if you may certain amount of money you need not to put eggs in one basket because if you if you sleep and follow those those eggs are all gonna break you need to put money in different things that eventually those things will work for you i think that this is the only country that allows you to do because where i'm from a lot of things controlled by the government a lot of things so like if i go and open a business in russia i mean i can be an to a certain point unless i hit a unless i make like two three million dollars and then the government gets involved that's not even by entrepreneurs entrepreneurship and it's not even a lot of money i mean like i'd like in in in the us i mean like yeah you cannot buy it's like a studio apartment in new york city as a million dollars it's it's it's insane so but in europe or all other countries because they're small and they're so controlled by the government like if you make that money it's okay but if you make more the government is gonna come and be like hey you work for us now especially russia like russia is like that if you if you open a business and a business is popping you making a lot of money at a certain point the government is gonna be like hey you cannot own this business you're gonna work for us because for them if you gain so much popularity or something else you can overthrow the government to have some influence in some people and they cannot allow that this is what this is what happened with with jack m and and and like the like the cc or like the people's republic of china right like that's like he was billionaire and he was too outspoken mh and they didn't like that and then he disappeared for a little while and then he came back and all of a sudden he's not so outspoken anymore yeah so i get it like i think that i also think that you know we have to be very like we're so we're we're so blessed to have the opportunity that we have in in the us and like the fact that you can really just do whatever you want to to any significant degree as long as it's legal you can build whatever you want you can make any decision you want you can you can create businesses have never existed before you can quit your job you can do whatever yeah for sure and it's just it's like it really is a blessing i think that people sometimes forget how the rest of the world works but yeah i've been so i've had some investments in production equipment stuff like that it was basically in of photography as well yeah i i started doing photos because i've had a base of photography in a college when i studied and then i took the different path but then i think twenty twenty when we're closed for i think it was four months or five months were closed i started kind of watching youtube videos because everything became so content related right so i was like let me watch some youtube of how to make videos how to make some content because like before i would hire people and i paid people a lot of money to do some stuff so it was like a thousand dollars for a video for one small video and then i was like what if i buy a camera i just learn some stuff and start doing myself just for shop related and it's more as i got into it more dove in into learning about it and like i feel like if you wanna become good you have to get inside the industry to supermarket yourself and yeah you cannot just get a small camera and be like okay you're good but i always i always raise the bar i always compare myself and i see somebody who's doing it better i was like okay how did they actually did it so i started watching all this watching youtube videos about videography and content creation and even like i don't wanna mention but i did a i did a course for my ex which was initial i wanted to make a course into tattooing and run a business as a tattoo shop which was idea in twenty twenty but i did as a trial something for somebody else just as a course and it it worked really well and we posted it online and she was making sales like a couple hundred bucks a month just out of like a small short course but it was for me like a learning path and then i kind of dove more into it because everything is more content creative creation and then you post on social media when you're like buying all this equipment and doing all this stuff so eventually i was like oh how do i actually i wanna have something so cinematic i was like how do i actually get that so i purchased like an expensive camera and kind of got more and more interest into it within the last five years so now you have one of the like now you have a massive collection of lenses too yeah so not like you're you're you're putting it very lightly when you say you do like most people most people when they say they go into it they buy a couple cameras they learn how to shoot they learn lighting they learn app they learn all the different things that are important for but you have now a collection of vintage lenses so but it's for me like it makes me money now because the initial idea was i start researching and you you look at a movies and you're like oh how this is actually shot and you you start reading and figuring things out so when i was doing some rentals i was trying to get stuff that nobody has but it's actually very valuable and and i think in the last few years people are looking for something different because when a camera started developing it was better sensor better quality but everything became the same so when you look for the same when there is known imperfections and stuff like that it just looks the same and then people are like let's actually go back to fifties or sixties and take something from there and shoot on that and then see do that and see now look it's so popular because on one side is ai which makes everything so plastic and so rendered on the other side people took lenses from fifty sixty seventies re house them in new housing because the other house wouldn't hold it and they should movies on it like a lot of movies in the last two years are shot on film why because the film it just looks really good and then the technology actually when we shot on film in nineties there was no scanners that we have now so when you shoot on film you scan after but you can scan sixteen millimeter film which is the half of the thirty five millimeter into a four k which before couldn't and then it's much better quality than the camera like this i mean it looks much better and then they should movies with that because film itself looks better it it it reacts different on a light so and you know like once i dove into something start researching and you start seeing okay this looks good but how was actually made and you see that a lot of movies and commercials right now they shot on film and they put in big budgets because film cost more but it just looks different it looks good chip station is a success story partner you know what separates successful online businesses from literally everyone else it's not just having great products it's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back all of my friends that run the biggest e commerce companies they use ship station and it has completely transformed how they handle orders they save thousands on shipping costs thanks to their rate chopper tool that finds the best discounts and what makes ships station brilliant you never need to upgrade because it grows with your business no matter how big you get and they offer discounts up to eighty eight percent off ups d express and usps rates and up to ninety percent 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into breakout sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with all these great entrepreneurs decision makers industry leaders peers who are actively shaping the future of business from september third to fifth at the mo center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it is it inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today what do you think is so what you're sort of talking about is more of an analog world in terms of like photography like it's like film as opposed to digital what do you think we lose as creative when we move from sort of legacy product analog to digital to i don't know how to describe it like with with with film every single shot you have to pay attention to because it you because you won't have so much film and it cost a lot of money digital it's almost like you'd be wasteful we can shoot as many times we want doesn't really matter so what are outside of that idea what do you think we lose when we move from analog to digital so i can start from four away when i was in college it was steel film photography and then i i feel like after first year when i was in second year in college the first digital cameras were introduced and people switched to it because on film you have to think so much it was also expensive but you you need to know so much just to shoot something decent which like you can show a lot of film but to process and all that stuff is gonna look like shit if you don't know the exposure the rules the loss how the light works on digital when we got the digital cameras when i first got a okay i shoot everything like i whatever i see i'm like oh let's take picture of this let's take picture of you go on vacation you should everything in the same with the iphones but you look at my camera roll it's garbage there's so much away but then i don't look at those like i don't i'm not gonna scroll through all of this and find something gonna be like while this amazing once i started diving deepening in photography in twenty twenty once i got a first film camera in twenty twenty two i start shooting less but i start thinking more and it was all almost like i would go somewhere but i would shoot one roll and it's already only like thirty six shots but each single shot is meaningful like i would go have the scans put on my phone and it brings the memories back because it was probably the mess best one memory out of the day that i've shot or i've seen somebody or i've been to this amazing sunset and i've shot it and it's just one photo instead of if i would go and i've been there and i would shoot two hundred photos on on my digital camera and i have to scroll through and be like okay one is amazing and then once you switch to that once you go back to digital which i charter shoot more digital right now if i do stuff but i start thinking about it anymore i'm not gonna shoot like two hundred from each around the subject i know this looks good because if i would have film i'm not gonna shoot ten ten shots of just of this i'm gonna show one and i'm gonna make sure it's good i'm gonna make sure the emotions are good i'm gonna make sure it's valuable yeah it's almost like memories become disposable to a degree because we don't pay attention to what we're actually capturing them yeah so i i think it switched my perspective to with because with the film each role is like twenty bucks twenty three dollars to buy and it's only thirty six shots and into process a row it's about twenty dollars to process in cannon shots like forty dollars for only thirty six shots it i mean it's it's money but you know people should film because it looks different and some people would even say it looks amazing and but once you switch to that to that mentality you go back to digital and digital could be even better than the film but once you start thinking about it because you turn that in your brain because you have all that card space and you're like okay i can shoot every single thing i can pick the best photo but once you have a thousand photos or two thousand photos for you to go scroll through especially everybody the more right now everybody so busy with everything like it's more and much more busier world than it was even ten years ago and i feel like for me because i'm so busy with business related stuff something else related stuff i wanna have something valuable as a memory and i like i bought a like a camera like in twenty twenty two and i was like okay if i should i'm gonna shoot the best memories and i actually start shooting printing stuff and put in my walls people will come like oh my god this looks amazing because it also it skin really well and then it it it looks more natural than it's digital because the digital has so much more in a sensor like i've shot with the studio lights and stuff like that and i printed it it it still looks very plastic but once you print from a film from an actual negative it looks really really good it looks like magazine quality and i've i've had pictures like this printed on my walls in my apartment which i i look and out i was like sometimes few years past and i'm like damn i did that well it's it's amazing i mean but i i do think it's switched my perspective of and i i think it should apply to everything i mean like everything should be thoughtful even in tattoos my friends at a while ago when i was when i first opened in a shop was taking a lot of clients and he said just think about this once you do work each work in the end should be photographed and be worth to post on your wall that's what he said he said to me don't just do work to have a quality work mh try to do work aim for better and i actually i had a book that i i just i just bought somebody said like what look at this book and it's talk around don't like that style but it said in the beginning of the book aim for the moon and you'll end among amongst the stars so it was like almost try to strive to create something better even if it's a small symbol but you can think okay what if i do it to be put on the wall i everything do do better do it to be put on the wall do it so that you can yeah don't just create to create yeah create with like purpose yeah and i think that changed my perspective with with work in general i think like you can aim for better and and plan as well like people say when you live with no plan for the business for yourself like you can have a plan doesn't mean that it's gonna end up to be that way but even if you decide to go for a mile if you even go for twenty percent or run for like five miles even if you run first time as twenty percent you already run something yeah it's better than but if if you don't have that plan it's better then you don't have a plan you can wake up and you don't have anything in mind where you wanna be in your like just stuck floating around i guess do you feel like well i was gonna ask i was gonna ask what are the lessons from photography that have impacted your your tattooing but i guess that's the answer it's like be purposeful i think also photography itself and tattooing is seen the light is very important to see the light seal the shape see the composition complimentary colors how colors work in nature because it applies for tattooing because certain stuff i mean unless it's a traditional tattoo it's like three colors years the black and white that's one thing but once you do something color realism you need to know color theory and people always say and i always say once you do shadows you mix the tone with opposite on the color wheel tone to create shadows like that that it looks more natural it looks it's sometimes scary to mix orange with the purple but it it neutralize it creates the gray and the same for everything for a photography too like if i would set lights if i would set complimentary colors how we say in a lot of movies it looks really good because it's orange teal it's two colors compliment it's colors opposite on a car wheel when we put the background is a teal color and and your skin can be pushed a little bit to be more orange or too orange it looks very it looks pleasing into the eye so there's there's is laws with that so i think a lot of things like that it applies and the same for the lighting like if you take the renaissance painting how they call it rem brand lighting or hollywood lighting they call it right when there is a triangle and go on the shadow side and the light is from the angle that that goes to you and they should usually from a from a shadow side but there's is always like a triangle they call with hollywood lighting but look at cara paintings that's how he would set up the lights paint all these scenes like everything is like comes from somewhere everything has like a whole path of all those things you know do you feel like photography has made you a better tattoo artist and vice versa i think so yeah do you think like other artists should i guess the question is if you're a creative or an artist does it make sense for you to expand into different mediums to to learn new things and new skills i think it's hard to sit on how they say don't sit on chairs at the same time i think it's better to focus on one thing and try to make everything to be better at it so if you do tattoos this good to make our paint on a side go to art seminars but photography right now applies the tattoo because first we take photos of our tattoos because before we didn't now we have to take a good photo of tattoo and to take a good photo we need to understand the light you need to understand how to sort up the light because you wanna present that product and then even more to the advance with all these reels you need to be a content creator to the point that you need to be able to make the video or understand what people would watch in terms of what kind of video they watch so it it's a lot of things right now involved but i i think it is hard to be maybe a really good photography and good tattoo artist at the same time because i feel like you need to constantly do the same that you need to put that ten thousand hours that you need to put the consistent work because i do shoot photos in the studio and i should like once a month somebody asks me but i feel like if i would just shoot the photos at a studio every day i would be so good at it i would i'd like just need to hit that point of just the hours and that experience that little things like you see once you work more you see okay like i can ask to turn the head this way i can put the light that way it's it comes more subconsciously when you're in a stressful environment i think whatever we put it more like in prince in our brain that we do it with a hands without thinking about it but once we got thrown in in that environment in a stressful environment if we don't have that enough of like learning that thing we're gonna fuck it up we're gonna we're gonna mess it up the same with like sports too like i've done for a while and i think once they make you do one move constantly just one move or one escape for like a whole class or like thirty minutes and you come back after a week and you have to do it again or they they have to review how you learn because it has to be a muscle memory and things the every everything i think even writing books and doing anything things like a muscle memory you just have to build it up to the point when you know the basics you know the laws and then you can create something to yourself i love that and also like once what once you know the there's a difference between learning something so that it helps you with your other parts of your work versus learning something to be a master at it yeah like for example you can learn photography you can learn how to paint you can learn all these different art other sort of artistic mediums and it can help you as a tattoo artist but it doesn't mean that you have to become yeah the best at that thing you're not gonna be i don't know i don't know the names of big photographers i'm sure you do but you don't have to be that person who's like who does this for a living yeah do you think that technology is good or bad for art i feel like technology is good for art because if you if you take historically people they were really good artists they were not recognized or some people would literally paint amazing things or photograph amazing things like a vivian meyer tech photos and then when she passed somebody discovered all these photos and the apartment she became famous but that's many artists but yeah and then and and it's many artists back then and i feel like now with the technology and just becoming viral or being able to post something and people can see in other parts of the world that is amazing i feel like before it was like a a label to an artist that artists are alcoholic artists are always broke they always starving it's not like a good path the parents will would take it that way hey like you need a real job you need to be a lawyer doctor or something else to make the money but because we have so much tools that are free to be exposed to big audience we can hit that big audience painting something and we can sell prints we can make art gallery we can go to other country and make an art show where where before when there was no technology people even would know like yes true it was only if it was spoken or newspapers or people if if people start talking about something there was people that got known but there's so many artists back in the day they just painted in their house and whatever they died nobody they died alcoholic they died broke and nobody knew and then somebody discovered now like holy shit and it all other stuff sold for billions of dollars after their debt yeah but it would be beneficial if those people wouldn't have to live like that which maybe i don't know there's always like you know a fight of your flash on your soul like the artist has to be spiritual in a sense to be able to create something bigger so i think maybe being in pain or struggling push people to create something yeah i was curious if you think that like people become less proficient at their craft if they're if life's too good because even nowadays like you think about martial arts people like conor mac mcgregor once he got what he wanted or he got the money he doesn't train his hard he cannot fight anymore to a top level but if you take back in a day when there was no social media and you cannot get that fame like mike tyson or somebody else when there was no money that you can make right now based on social media or like cool chavez when he had like two hundred whatever fights now it's like two three fights and then if your character if you're good you can become so famous that sponsors will pay so much money people never made before so that's beneficial of technology but it also ruins probably the passion because once you have them on your lifestyle changes your patterns change you do other things and maybe you wanna do other things because like if you just have to hustle just to pay the bills even if you're amazing at what you do it's like one thing but once you have an access to all of this then you can do so much more you can learn something else and i mean personally have you ever lost your edge because of success no i never did but i i also don't know what it is to like if i would ever make like twenty million dollars i don't know what it is to to fill that way i mean i was working for somebody and barely paying bills and then i i made this amount of money that i had some real estate purchase i bought a house for my parents like stuff like that but it's it's all it was like a hard work for a long period of time that i feel like i deserve matter you never work again money it was never a you like yeah money one check that yeah if i would even have an opportunity like that that's that's different i don't know how i i would feel where the person i would be but i i do know that when people get into that position their surroundings change the people how they take them like it it everything changes around them so i i don't know did your did your parents ever like come to terms of what you do for a living my parents hated it first my parents were making fun of it and the when i first started tattooing and i was still doing graphic design on the side i was building websites i worked for some companies i actually did a website for formula one racer and like i've had really good clients that would pay me a lot of money but my parents were like oh you're just doing this just as a hobby should get a real job you should maybe get another degree and i until i moved to new york and until i made the money that i i bought a house for my parents it was like in twenty fifteen i think once i did that and once i start like sending money to support my mom or my dad they were like hey you have a good opportunity you live in states it's good good education you should maybe the money you make you should invest in like on a free time just get another degree that's what they they would tell me like so they still can't get out of their the way that they look at the world because even if you're making money they're still thinking no but now they they now they don't because like after i bought a place for myself and all their stuff i own the business but for a long time if i was making decent amount of money they still we're like hey why don't you get a stable job and some something that you can rely on for rest of your life and then retire i mean never through that never threw you off them not sort of being okay it it did throw me off for sure but i i don't know i always i feel like when i was still in a high school i wanted to live on my own because i've i've had a big family and it was like a lot of people in a household and i've always always try to hang out people that are successful i always hang out with people that are older there i've had people that own businesses their friends and i was in in like eighteen or twenties and people will take me on a trips and people who own construction companies or something else and may like i don't know a million dollars a year back then and like with considering me a friend because i knew certain things that they didn't have anybody around like i knew like how to do web development how to do graphic design and certain things about the marketing so they were interested in that skill because they didn't have it so i was helping them to do those things but they wanted to hang out with me just for like maybe like a helpful exchange but i've been around those people and seeing different type like different success from early age because my both parents like my dad worked as a professor at the university he worked as a teacher and then worked as a professor at the university teaching technology and math for all his life for like fifty years until he was pushed to retire but he never did stuff for himself he just worked for a check and got a check and then and then that's it and then get pushed out and then my mom because there was three kids that she had she couldn't work for a certain time and she had a really good job before my younger sister was born but when my younger sister was born she was like i have three kids i i don't have any time so he she had to quit the job and when she tried to go back in two thousands to get a job back it was a completely different world everybody was already computers it was everything in a system automated and she worked as an accountant before for a huge government thing for the spaceship company and then once in two thousand she try to go back there like sorry we kinda take even you have experience with working this there like you have to go and get at least four or five years of education to catch up to catch up and then you can go back and chill us like holy shit four or five years and then have to pay for location so she never did she did a little bit of like half a year a year and then worked jobs here and there but it's still a mentality i think if you were gonna just walk through so i want the audience to sort of they've learned a lot but i want them to learn sort of say a lesson or a failure that you've experienced that you wouldn't wish anybody else would ever have to go through but it was a very valuable lesson for you what would that what would that moment be and it can be it doesn't have to be in business it can be but something that you think you learned quite a bit that you think somebody else hopefully will never have to experience firsthand i think in life everything should be balanced like sometimes and and me personally i have a lot of issues with that i would basically throw myself into work and i just over overworked myself like i i would get into something and i know that i could do more so i i could basically go and work seven days a week but it does huge impact on a mental health i think everything should be balanced why why i start doing photography because i needed something to take my mind off and once your mind is into a business if you want a business to succeed you just put all your resources all your energy into it and there is a negative impact into your body from that which you might not feel in the beginning but in a certain period of time it's gonna hit you and it can hit really hard and some people that did jobs for many years sometimes they just fall sick and then they cannot work anymore or something else so i think that's the biggest lesson i've learned from own in a business i think you need to balance things and sometimes going less is going more in a long term sometimes like pushing pushing more or going forward more can end up that you wouldn't be able to do that anymore and i think balancing in your life if you have a family or if you having in a hobby it's good to take your mind off if you try to do a business i think some days you just have to be completely off the phone you like my wife i start doing like street photography there i really enjoy i would take a camera i just go outside i'm not looking at a phone i'm not doing anything i'm like okay for three four hours i'm just gonna walk around and find something interesting and take photos because i was working so much first few years then i start getting sick a lot and you notice your body shutting down yeah and i was like when i first started happening i was like okay i just go take antibiotics because i was like getting sick with like a flu or cold like consistently but i was putting so much work because i was like oh i'm here but i can do even more so you're like i'm the only me i have that this time but it it also i think it should be that every everybody needs to learn that you can hire people to do the jobs that they can do but you you pay them less money because your time is more valuable for the money that you make so you don't have to clean your house when you can hire somebody for ten dollars an hour to clean your house because if you clean your house unless you're enjoying it if you clean your house you're gonna take half a day to do it but at the same time you can do something more valuable or spend time with your family and i think thinks in your life should be very balanced that way i think if you just throw yourself into something and even if it's going well it can end up like hurting yourself or doing something something bad yeah because you you kind of just get distracted by like the short term wins yes and i i think sometimes like little steps is even better steps forward because in a in a long term it's gonna be better but i i also think like if you if there is opportunities any nec opportunities it's better to take them because you like you can regret them later and somebody told me a long time ago i mean if you don't knock on a door i've i i've had a guy when i met i was like in my twenties and he was very successful he did construction and he told me it was long time ago but it it's stuck to me he said that he was trying to do business and he he was from poor family he was trying to make a lot of money and be rich and he tried many things and he said it's better to ask because of like if you if if you have ideas it's better to try and to ask people to learn from people because if if if you're afraid like you're just gonna be thinking about it that you never tried but if you try and if you fail you failed but some sometimes you you try and you succeed and he was like when he finished his university he said i was just knocking on everybody's door because i wanna be successful he was like i got into this i was selling elevators it failed i i was doing this it failed i was doing this it failed and then he did a construction company got a lot of connections and he was in a lot of money he was making millions of dollars off that but he said i failed so many times i had debt i had people there pissed off i had this and this but you learned from your mistakes and i i think like in my life a lot of stuff was like learning here and there from different people they've been around and i think it since like an early age i kind of seen how these people be because of what they're successful the patterns and all other stuff but i also i also think you can hire people to do other things for you and like for people don't spread themselves in like you you can if you wanna do marketing research if you wanna do something else you can hire people source them from other you can learn a little bit so you can learn a little bit fail but also at the same time you have to balance that two things could be true at the same time good for you to learn and fail at the same time it's also good for you to delegate responsibilities you don't do everything yourself it's a balance i think that also i think that also like for entrepreneurs it's important to to try and learn and if you do fail at least you've learned a little bit so that you can now when you hire people to help you make a better hiring decision you see what's good you see what's good yeah and i i also read a thing when you hire somebody to do the job it's better to write the steps exact steps they have to do to make that happen to make the product or to make the job because if you say hey create me a website or like hey write this right write this article that i need to post on a blog but if you put the exact steps if you put i wanna write this blog but for me if i would do it i would go and do a research on internet based on this topic and based on another i would put every single step and they would do a good job that you would do but if you just write a task without explaining it or without the steps to to make to create that task that it wouldn't be valuable or it wouldn't apply to your business because you see it a different way but you cannot express yourself you cannot explain how you want it to be and sometimes you just throw it out there as a as a task and you hire somebody and they do a shitty job and you're like shit i paid this person money but i have to redo it and do it myself which like i learned sometimes is better for me to do it but it also i don't have much time but it's you have to find that balance and try to explain it better for people education is suit yeah that are they're doing it what would be the most important thing you've had to un learn i try not to attach myself to things it's it's like a hard thing but we get attach to people to habits to something else i try not to and the human nature to be honest yeah i try i try not to attach to things because like paths will die and you know we love them so much but it's it's like a thing but like i think switching up like you you literally like if you have a same pattern of of something i think switching things up is is a good thing like you have to kind of un learn to fall into the same pattern of life because you would learn and get comfortable somewhere like i have friends that i i just see maybe because my brain works differently but i see people that are like they try things they find what works for them like even food like they would find a restaurant and it would go there because they eat the services good it makes them feel good but they're like fall into this pattern that they're scared to try something else i'll speak because goes to life with people with relationship with rest everything yes agreed and then they're they're like they're everything is well everything is is good for them they feel comfortable but they're just going with a flow i guess yeah and if in in my like in my experience i just seen it because i've been to different countries people like that when something happens it it could happen as like an accident or they can get sick or something else like somebody dies it throws them off they're not resilient but yeah they cannot adjust to that situation and they end up not not well or they end up going into a therapy or something else for a long time or something happen they like get on drugs or whatever because because they don't they don't know how to deal with it but once you once you un that once you just try to like detached yeah you detached detach from things but you kind of you can adopt to anywhere or to anything i think it's a good it's a good thing it's a good skill especially for me like i i come from a country where i feel more comfortable in being here like i still for i've been here fifteen years i still feel like if i go back there i feel more comfortable like i know the culture i understand the people i know how the food i know how the system works i know how everything works and i have less stress as like the mental stress that is is in my head than being here because here i feel like i don't have any family and i i'm always a tech that i have to pay the bills i'm like something can happen or this and this and this and ten million things but i think it change me as a person and the same with the business like maybe it's comfortable for me to go and work for somebody because if i own my own business i have to pay rent which is way more than i if i'm working for somebody way more than i'm paying for my apartment and then i need i have responsibilities of having employees that i have to pay and i have to provide the people who work from me work and find the work for them so it is more comfortable for me to go for a company and have stable money that i know maybe build my name and work there but once i thrown myself into uncomfortable into this crazy waterfall and i kind of readjust and learn how to swim i kind of feel less scary with other people like i go into something that is unknown and i don't feel scared or i go meet somebody or i speak with somebody who can be i don't know a billionaire and i mean i feel comfortable speaking with them because it changed me as a person and i think i pro i approach things different way and i had that experience in me which i think it's a good thing if people wanna connect with you if people actually wanna go to the shop where should they go so socials everywhere you wanna send them so shop is called first class tattoos it's on fifty two canal street in manhattan they can go follow us first class nyc on instagram we also have a website where we have some works and my personal instagram is mikhail anderson with the two s's you can see it's like tattoos all over my page so can i'll put everything in the show notes too so people can just click through but sounds good then the last thing that i always like to ask so you've given over like a lot of different bits of wisdom but say out of your life you can only pass on one lesson to your kids it's the most important lesson what would that lesson be and why i think the biggest thing is not to like take care of your help from the early age i think that's probably the biggest lesson i want the kids or everybody to learn yeah and i i think that teaching that the kids because the school or anything else it doesn't teach the kids that but i i think if you want your kids to live in the world i think teaching them their finances and the money is a big thing but i i think the most important thing is health because once you don't have health every like it becomes the the main problem for anybody like that's the main focus you cannot enjoy your life you cannot do many things that you could have done so i think taking care of eating healthy exercising taking care for yourself for your mental health and all that stuff i think because the in my opinion is the most important advice success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in my miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there cognate is a success story partner now have you ever wondered how all those scammers get your phone numbers all those tele marketers how you're always drowning in all these spam calls it's data brokers right now hundreds of companies are collecting and selling your personal information without your consent your address your phone number even your family members names to anyone is willing to pay and this puts you at risk of identity theft scams and harassment and that's where cog comes in they contact over two hundred and thirty data brokers on your behalf and legally force them to delete your personal information no more spending hundreds of hours doing it yourself in cog handles all the paperwork follows up on objections and keep your data off the market with repeated removal i've actually been using incognito myself it's scary and also incredible to see how much of my data was out there but they get rid of it they've got a thirty day money back guarantee so you can try at risk use my code success adding cog dot com slash success to get an exclusive sixty percent off their annual plans you have to take back control of your privacy today you just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday how can you find amazing candidates fast easy just use indeed stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites with indeed sponsored jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs don't wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed dot com slash p o k a t z thirteen just go to indeed dot com slash p o k t z thirteen right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast terms and conditions apply hiring indeed is all you need

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there in this lessons episode explore why control and sales is essential to building trust and closing deals without pressure discover how predictable behavior weakens influence and invites buyer dominance understand why traditional discovery calls frustrate prospects and waste opportunities and uncover strategies to frame conversations that create autonomy while keeping control of the process now i love the way you you switched the the mindset when you go into the sales conversation but a lot of people i think have an issue trusting like it's it's trusting the process right a lot of people have an issue trusting the process so i guess you do you have advice for someone who's selling who doesn't wanna blow the deal like that's the constant thing that's stuck in everyone's head and that's why people default to the other way the traditional way to not good way of selling yeah i i i haven't thought about this before but you know it'd be great i know you have a very sophisticated listener base you know maybe maybe they could memorize this line and and try it's sort of when you have the customer who's trying to take control the sense is you know hey scott just when you think you know the answer i changed the question so and by that i mean the predictable nature of your behavior as a salesperson is the thing that works against you people come to meetings not to hear the features and the benefits and the price you get that on the internet get that on a zoom call right people come to a meeting to meet new interesting colorful people with real insight about their business who's an expert in their kind of problem who they can work with to really get a solution to the the problem they have k and so that person has to be you they spend time with that person when that person offers insight and novel solutions to what the buyer already knows so if you are just diligently giving a buyer what it is you have the features the benefits the solution or your customers are the the the it is putting the buyer in total control and so when you feel like you don't wanna put any pressure on the buyer or blow up your sale you're doing the exact opposite by not pressuring the buyer in any way and just following the you know stamp a sale plan you're actually j the sale right the the buyer will chase you and be interested and start to invest time when he knows you're an expert you have a great product you're the best in the world right and that you're not just allowing him to buy and be in total control when you take that control away it raises the stakes and makes the buyer interested you cannot end a sales presentation by insane so what do you think would you be interested in this do you have any questions buyer gets control you not have any questions right now similar of the material you don't mind sending proposal we'll take a look at it i gotta show to the committee you know i meet with the sas and the lo ness monster you know every t of the month they tell me when i'm allowed to budget i get a check budgeting i'll get back to you if we have any more questions and then they're gonna go look for another version of what what it did you sell cheaper better from china what yeah yeah so so without so to answer your question when you don't go for control because you're scared of it you're actually harming yourself more than you ever could by going for control the issue is control by not attempting to take control at all you end up being controlled by the buyer the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their back end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the op authority wherever you get your podcasts success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there the michigan achievement scholarship is funding every grad every path and odds are your high school senior or recent grad will qualify for free money for community college public or private university or career training no matter their gpa and the scholarship is less income base than you might expect wherever your child is headed there's free money to get them where they wanna go learn more at mi dot gov slash achievement so i love that thank you because i think a lot of people have to hear that again and again and again and beat it into their heads because i i fully agree that if you can't control that you can't offer anything besides the the points that are listed on a website you're taking a step further obviously not putting it very simply like very simply but if you're just offering the points on the website what good are you you're a walking brooks brochure and that's not gonna help anybody right that's not helping the customer if you actually care about the customer you're actually doing them into service so let's talk about and at any point i don't know where the good kick point to flip the script is so you tell me but control flip the flip the script sounds like a control thing i know you spoke a lot about control and pitch anything about framing about and i don't know that is control something that you always have to fight for or does it come naturally how do you there's so many techniques and strategies how do you know when you have to think about control and when it's just the way you conduct yourself and then we can go and flip this scary word yeah people understand it because the reason it's a scary word is you can't control people it's not possible right so now you have a horn class scott cla talking about control right until you're confused and understand you should be so because you cannot tell people what to do you cannot force anybody to do something not cannot corner anybody into a position you can't ask by the way this is sales on gladiator you know how do we corner somebody how do we force someone see it all the time when people say hey i'm ready you having a good time you know everybody here ready to learn something yam the motherfucker i came to the conference you know it's nine in the morning i had a cup of coffee nothing can go wrong i never heard something those are rhetoric questions it's a setup right hey mister mister jones you know if i could get you the air conditioning unit know that could air condition your whole building and lower your price and we could take away your old unit and it wouldn't cost you anything is that something you'd be interested in yeah asshole of course i'd be interested in it but that's not how the world works right you know so so when you now the buyer's is not gonna probably call you a motherfucker right but he will think it okay depends depends on the buyer but yeah yeah i'll do it for you oh but but the rhetoric questions or asking doing sort of exploratory to more discovery calls the discovery calls is are very popular today young people mh i don't know how i'll done you are you're like twenty three years old but you know the the these twenty two twenty three year old millennials have sort of gl on to this idea of the discovery called you think they're been so smart and clever and so you know how long have you felt this pain where do you see yourself in five years scott you know if you could solve this problem what would that mean for you you know the you know how long have you been dealing with this you know what would be the ideal solution in your mind hey hey listen to asshole right i came to a sales call for you to solve my problems not for me to aside my solve my problems i've already tried to solve them you know as a buyer i've tried to solve my problem and i failed i i ordered some stuff online it didn't work i hired a local consultant that failed i hired my my niece you know just got an mba to set up the website and she screwed them now we have holes in our data system so i've failed at this okay there i cannot teach you anything just look at my problem right understand the basics of it and give me your insight on where solution can come from i don't wanna spend half an hour telling you i have a very common problem my firewall doesn't work right you tell me what you know about firewalls but this is not a dis i don't wanna spend fifteen twenty minutes sharing with you all of my problems you should be able to recognize my problems and be familiar with it so the the by doing a discovery call by being nice by being looking for rapport by doing all the things that you you sort of see other pay other salespeople people do you are not only you're losing control but your you are not controlling the sale in a way that's frustrating for the buyer the buyer wants to see you controlling it k he wants you to ask very specific questions hey it looks like your firewall is you know causing a couple data security hacks they're coming over the tcp ip eleven it looks like you've got you know seventeen breaches in the last sixty days you know five of those involved the real data loss know we see this pretty often this happens in you know fifty eight to eighty person organizations as they start to crest through eight pet of data is that about like i'm not even in this business right but is that about right you know they want to see you starting to control the set of ideas and the conversation controlling the frame yeah around which the conversation is happening so pitch anything was about frame control how to focus the buyer on certain things that matter and get their focus away from things that don't matter how to con you know how to frame time how to frame power out to frame scarcity and these are the things that can be done and it gives some ideas on how to do it flip the script gives the scripts to control the the presentation and the conversation and the sales process with the buyer you have it that so so the real outcome was flip the script it lets you create a sandbox and that's where the control is it lets you create a sandbox that the buyer can then play in and do anything you wants have autonomy that's what could that's a problem with control right when you're really try and control somebody so scott what you think is just something be interested in if i could get you the price that you were looking for you know is this something we could sign up for today what have a special discount it expires in end a week i'll talk to my manager and if he'll approve you i can get this for just nine hundred dollars a month that's something we can go forward with right that is aggressive and it's controlling the reason you don't like that is because it takes away your autonomy mh in autonomy you can have mas those hierarchy and needs when he forgot to put on it is autonomy food water shelter love safety above all of that stuff is autonomy i would rather die on my feet then live on my knees every human has that built into their dna right autonomy and and self governance is the highest emotional highest survival need so when you as a salesperson start to take away autonomy self governance self decision making ability then you're losing the sale so you work so hard as a salesperson to do all be nice and and prepare presentation give the features and benefits then towards the end the sale so to take the buyers autonomy away when you're tired they wanna leave they really don't wanna see your face anymore and now you're going for control take their autonomy away that creates a failure state so flip the script lets you create a sandbox where you said all the parameters and then you back away and you give total autonomy to the buyer at the time that he wants it and that's why when we close like you say you know hey orange clap so the million copies of pitch anything number one most interviewed sales you know trainers sales guy pitch guy finance guy you know on the internet and and what's your best clothes and my best close is this so that's anything else we should do here i mean think we're wrapping up from you know if if you don't have anything else we're probably gonna pack up our stuff and leave that's my close you can't close at end there's nothing you can do then in sale to push somebody into making it a purchase now if if if you do most the time it just falls apart like it'll fall apart of contract and fall apart of finance follow so so yeah maybe you can get a signature you can get a yes but in a deal and remodel sell tvs you know i raised ten million dollars or sell million dollar contracts or five hundred or a thousand dollar things you know maybe you sell a tv that way i don't know an iphone maybe a car you know but but when you're really get the enterprise sales or services the the end of the sales not when you consider to control someone gonna put them in the deal even if you get it will fall apart so what you can do is set the whole thing up big idea problem the solution why do it now the the you know the value proposition what you get how it works the the social proof for the reputation you know who else we work with what we think the the solution is and then you could say but i need to get more you know i need to know more about you as i said before before we sort of agree to work with you right and and so when you set it up in that way you set up the sandbox where they are pitching you to become the of of of you know how to work with you as a per you pitching the idea that they shouldn't you know sign an agreement will give you a yes thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me you there incognito is a success story partner now have you ever wondered how all those scammers get your phone numbers all those tele marketers how you're always drowning in all these spam calls it's data brokers right now hundreds of companies are collecting and selling your personal information without your consent your address your phone number even your family members names to anyone is willing to pay and this puts you at risk of identity theft scams and harassment and that's where cog comes in they contact over two hundred and thirty data brokers on your behalf and legally force them to delete your personal information no more spending hundreds of hours doing it yourself and cognitive handles all the paperwork follows up on objections and keep your data off the market with repeated removal i've actually been using incognito myself it's scary and also incredible to see how much of my data was out there but they get rid of it they've got a thirty day money back guarantee so you can try at risk free use my code success at cog dot com slash success to get an exclusive sixty percent off their annual plans you have to take back control of your privacy today

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me there you just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday how can you find amazing candidates fast easy just use indeed stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites with indeed sponsored jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs don't wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed dot com slash p o k a t z thirteen just go to indeed dot com slash p k a t z thirteen right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast terms and edition apply hiring indeed is all you need in this lessons episode uncover how persistence and strategic focus drive exponential growth discover why doubling down on what works accelerate success understand the mindset behind the ten x rule and its call for massive action and explore why avoiding mediocrity and embracing bold moves separates winners from the middle class one thing one thing that i i wanted sort of highlight is you've built all these things like you know even like the training real estate conferences you've built them over a period of time but like there there's obviously it's been purposeful to an extent i'm as i'm assuming but i'm sure there's also some like oh shit this really works we should double down on that yeah so what's you know what's your process and you know what's what you've built out under like the the card capital empire and then like what's what's next like you know how do you decide what you wanna go into yeah so i'll i'll give you an example it's a great question okay like there's there's one division i'm not gonna mention what it is you know but that we have started three or four times now and every time it's failed i know it that it's going to be probably one of the most successful things i do i just cannot figure it out i haven't figured out i just can't get everybody duplicate okay what what what i have figured out in my mind so we just had not figured out how to scale it yet so again i started it had scrapped it i think four times now and just recently scrapped an entire department around it but i'm gonna go back and do it i know i'm gonna do it and i i i live off this saying that like i heard once forget who told me you said look if you don't quit you can't fail and there there there does come a time where you gotta quit too but maybe it doesn't mean quit maybe it just means slide over a little bit and but i quit on one thing i mean quitting drugs was a good thing for me right it just it it it didn't have a benefit and a big enough benefit and so yeah what what what we do double down though or or we look at what things what what things work and i think a lot of companies i know i didn't scale the way i should have because too often i was doing either the same thing over and over and not getting bigger like today when we find something that works we're like okay how do we connects that the ten x rule change my my life people talk about they talk about online about the ten x rule is the book that i wrote it was the third book i wrote and and people like that book is a game changer that books one of the best you know best books they've ever written and it's on a it's on the most top ten most inspirational books in the world but that that book was written for me i was trying to figure out at fifty years old how do i scale how do actually go from in two thousand eight i think i had three hundred apartments well i had a hundred and sixty apartments when i was thirty five so thirty five years old i had a hundred and sixty apartments when i was fifty years old i only had about a hundred and eighty boy like i didn't have maybe two thirty or something it wasn't that much more from two thousand eight till two thousand twenty i went from a hundred and sixty units or i guess i had what maybe two hundred and thirty units at the time i'm at seven thousand seven hundred i have more bake i have four times more vacancies three times more vacancies than i owned twelve years ago because i learned how to scale this ten next thing was about how do i take double down now don't just double down do i take something that's working and don't do something new take something that's working i think about jeff bezos right now because i'm like he he went from hey i'm gonna i'm gonna go from selling book books on amazon to selling everything on amazon scale yeah so how do you do that you you you study statistics and you double down when you're winning so notice i scrap i in that conversation i scrap one business four times because i can't make it work but that doesn't mean we didn't keep scaling the things that did and it also doesn't mean i won't go back and figure that other thing at the right time it's a good it's a good attitude and i think it's that's why it's a it's a winning attitude when you when you can focus on what's actually working and obviously it's you know like listen it it'd be stupid not to say it works look at what you've built out but and and get rid of the ego get get rid of that like right now in two thousand twenty here we are on april right we have this could be the thing happen and we have massive unemployment worldwide literally a worldwide recession if not a depression about it information right now this is not the time for me to go try something this is the time for me to double down on what's working how to help people right now how do i scale card on university how do i help customers i need to actually contract a second so that i could pull the forces back and prepare for another assault yeah you you can't just go run out like a lot of people think ten x is oh all the time you're ten next x sometimes ten x means i gotta contract again get rid of of stuff so i can double down or ten x on the things that are working so i can move again and set up that other company that i want to to for instance the real estate i can't go expand my real estate portfolio in this environment today not because i don't want to but because the markets have seized up i i need a second i need a second for things to relieve themselves to to in order to go back and go from seven thousand units to to fourteen thousand units success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in my miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the house hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their backend end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your off in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the op authority wherever you get your podcasts are you done patrol or jan patrol either way start your day with mcdonald's local breakfast platter sizzling spam fluffy rice and more open five am earlier at participating mcdonald's love it's a smart mentality too just like level yourself off even purposefully like you're you're leveling yourself off purposely can you can you can you walk through the ten x rule like i know you sort to touched on points but like just high level just because some people may not you know like you're known as the ten x guy but what is the ten x rule at its core yeah well the ten x rule first of all the ten x rule is not an idea it's a way of life and and people that go ten x or massive action people and and and the premise of the book is there's four levels of action there's you don't do anything you retreat you do average or you go to next now the first three the first three we we everybody knows somebody who does nothing that you call them late the act actually it's impossible to do nothing but but just for conversation we'll say a person does nothing we know that's not gonna work going retreating if you retreat your entire lifetime it's gonna be very painful retreating by the way is actually takes more energy than just normal activity just the guys that get up every day and go to work every day going back making a decision to do something and not doing it is is very painful a lot of wear and tear going backwards the third the third one is the most damaging of all three which is normal levels of activity the acceptable the average the the middle class the norm because you get lost these people get lost they work every day they show up every day they dig ditch dishes every day they do a good job every day they're loyal every day but they never get rewarded ever number three is the story of my whole life that that's where i operate most of my life most people normal levels of activity maybe just above normal just enough to shine a little bit but dude i never went for it and and and so the ten x rule was like okay how do i really take some risk here how do i really put myself out there so the middle class of america is basically laid up on number three being convinced to go to number two and and then ended up with not basically they'll end up with number one and how do you suggest somebody takes that move from three to four yeah so you what you would what you would do is you you you need to understand that number three is is the the biggest disaster that we have it's where all wealth is created on the backs of number three the the the the wealthy the wealthy and this will happen again will come out of this this virus thing people will go back to consuming again and they'll go back to debt they'll go back to borrowing money to buy things they don't even need to impress people they don't even know because they're unsure about who they are and where they're going and so the the the middle the middle of the the spine of america the spine the middle class of india when it develops the middle class of china will fund the wealthy and because they they do the normal things the wealth wealthy do not do normal things they do completely and you know they they do they don't they don't save money wealthy people don't save money they invest money wealthy people don't spend time or manage time they they they take money this useless they know it's useless and they buy get a thousand employees and then everybody's like well you know that guy never works he hired one thousand people to do work mh this is an old story by the way you can go back to the king tu okay i mean it's it's it's it's not a new story it's like how do you get wealthy well you commit the massive action how do you do massive action you you only have forty hours a week or a eighty or a hundred elon musk says hey man hundred hours he works a hundred hours a week he he he does the video about the hundred hours he's like look if i do a hundred and you do forty i went he's a smart dude too by the way real smart guy but he's nobody without the risk without the big thing and without the massive action and why do you think why do you think that everybody has so much trouble understanding this concept that they just have to amplify themselves why are they stuck in this is it is it education is it the way like society culture what what's yeah society culture education you've been taught you've been talked to be seen and not hurt thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you 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sometimes it's the success of a parent that drives somebody to success and sometimes it's the lack of success of a parent that drives somebody to success in my case my father he did find but he did not mask great wealth i think that pushed me to wanna prove that i could do well in my own right he's an entrepreneur an investor and a visionary who's built success across industries from pioneering one of the largest commercial real estate projects in us history to launching ventures in clean energy and technology one of the problems with first time entrepreneurs who are successful and they assume it's all their skill and they they'll just keep doing it again so there's a false confidence that comes when luck is miles on you and you have a great first fortune it just doesn't work out that way michael w seinfeld has never stopped pushing boundaries but perhaps his most impactful creation is t i g e r twenty one the world's leading peer learning network for high net worth entrepreneurs and investors through it he's helped some of the most success leaders on the planet navigate wealth risk and legacy his story is about building giving back and redefining what true success really means sometimes children of parents of extreme success are overwhelmed and assume they could never do better than their parents and it can be demo eating when you're starting something from scratch when a seller is selling something the buyer can see something completely different that's where great opportunity was waiting michael first of all thank you so much for coming on this is gonna be a lot of fun and you have an incredible story but i have heard the story of your father and i think that just to tee up what shaped to as a person and what made you so resilient just living with this man i think it would be good for the audience to just discuss the man whose house you grew up in because it's in a remarkable story so my father was a german jewish refugee from germany during world war two in nineteen thirty eight his mother was able to get he and his brother out of germany to england they had tried to come to the united states but we had closed our borders and as hitler was approaching the family literally considered a kind of mass suicide of all of the family members but my father says that he convinced his mother not to do that and she was by stroke of luck able to get him to england and then in england just like we did with the japanese the english intern all germans whether they were jewish or not and sent them to a prisoner of war camp if they were sixteen or older my uncle was fourteen so he stayed at the school in england while my father was intern and sent to australia to a prisoner of war camp in the middle of australia this was september nineteen forty he was seventeen years old and when he got to the prisoner of war camp within a week he was able to convince the command on that in fact he wanted to fight the nazis he'd not and he was not one and because he had been in england for about a year his english was apparently quite good and convinced him to send him back to england and the boat that they had come on had three thousand prisoners of war and going back to england it was dead heading back with four people on the boat and the boat four passengers and the boat was bombed in the indian ocean by an italian mara if you will nobody had told the people on the boat that the boat was being used as a d decor to have the italian boat come out and then there was an english frigate behind the italian that they didn't know it and that's how they were able to take out the italian pirate boat if you will but his boat was hit and he was let off in bombay india at the age of seventeen with nothing and somehow it's a longer story but he was able to become the manager of an electronics factory for six months if you can imagine that in nineteen forty and eventually made his way to the united states and then his parents in the meantime had escaped to germany and they were both doctors and he was able to reunite with them in baltimore where he spent a year or two when he then enlisted the beauty then is particularly with all the issues of immigration today if you enlist in the army you got automatic automatic citizenship and so he became a citizen in nineteen forty two he was a private in the army but at the end of the army he was tapped by general bill donovan the founder of the os which then became the cia the os s was tasked with managing the nor trials and my father was tapped at the age of twenty three to be the chief interpreter of the us prosecution he was one of the first private in history to be carrying orders signed directly by the president he went behind the enemy lines to him home to gather some evidence but he quickly became ga personal interpreter gary was the number two nazi after hitler and the most important part of that was that many people know the history that hitler came to power when the rice dog was burned down and he claimed that it had been the communists that had burned it down and that's why he needed to be given dictator powers one day my father was sitting in the prison with gearing and gary said richard would you like to hear a little secret and my father said yes hair gary he said i burned down the rice dog hitler told me to do it and it changed the perception of history and all that happened because clearly hitler used that as the pretext for coming to power when hi hindenburg abandoned his powers well if that wasn't enough my father after n came home became a world famous engineer finished the color tv i have the final patents on seventeen patents on color tv at home but in those days he was working for a corporation it happened to be rca c unlike today if you were an engineer you'd probably get royalties he was paid a salary but he got the pleasure of finalizing c tv we had literally tv number one that came off of the production line in our home when i was growing up he then sent the first satellite into orbit it was a weather satellite became the dean of a business school and for a while was in charge of all of nbc nbc's operations and then his last invention was something called a video disc before dvds came out there was a competing product that was tried in the market developed called video disc it was a technological triumph but a commercial failure so with all of that i had a brilliant father who was a bit of a inflexible german personality so on the one hand it's nice to tell you the story it wasn't as easy growing up with him as my father as the accomplishments might suggest what does that was that pressure that's put on you is there expectation that's put on you to succeed to do certain things to pursue particular career paths out of your father's life and legacy how did that impact you as a young child you know it's interesting because if you look at tiger we have sixteen hundred members around the globe and some of our members success came because they were competing if you will with their parents and wanting to show that they could outs shine them and some of our members success came from because they came from homes that were broken homes and their parents had not amounted too much and they wanted to prove to the world that they could do better than their parents so sometimes it's the success of a parent that drives somebody to success and sometimes it's the lack of success of a parent that drives somebody to success obviously in my case my father was he he did fine but he was not he did not a mass great wealth but he had extraordinary stature and accomplishments and his mind was quite extraordinary and you know i think that pushed me to wanna prove that i could do well in my own right sometimes children of parents of extreme success are overwhelmed and assume they could never do better than their parents and it can be demo so one of the real challenges with anybody who's achieved any kind of success whether it's material or a great author or cured cancer whatever it is is trying to encourage your kids to find their own way to be successful in their own right not feel that they have the shadow hanging over them of a parent who they could never match you know you have it with every president's children and you know it's unusual that's why when for better or worse whether you were a fan or not when george bush came to power after his father had been power that's a very unusual story of a child of somebody so successful being able to match that as well when you think about sort of the path that you took in life you had a very i mean at thirty one it was thirty one correct when you sold harbors side financial center for over a hundred million those numbers are correct and that age is correct that is still remarkably young i know i know that there are some some people that have built massive amounts of wealth at an even younger age but i would say that objectively thirty one is a pretty good age to have a hundred million dollar sales so obviously you were quite ambitious quite aggressive with your career do you think that do you think you in particular were doing that because of what your father had achieved over his lifetime even if not financial success but just the stature and just the acclaim that he achieved or was it something internal that drove you in particular well one of the things that that i remember growing up was that i was raking lawns shoveling snow i was sling milk at the local dairy barn working at the tennis academy i always was ambitious to want to you know earn money that i could do what i want with and one of the things that stuck with me is sometimes when i would earn a fair amount of money i would spend it on something that my mother would thought was foolish and i remember my father saying you don't have a right to tell him that if he earned it fairly and honestly he can do any damn thing he wants with it as long as it's honest and okay and there was sort of this notion that when you have accumulated wealth it creates options that you might not have without it and so i think the combination of that sort of being drilled into my head that the road to freedom the road to the possibilities that i would control came from achieving success along with the example that he had set and by then by the way my i had married somebody in her father was also an incredibly successful man and so having a father and a father law whose shadows were overs me probably was a pretty powerful motivator although i think i was pretty motivated even from before that your first success that was a a hundred million dollar plus exit incredible what did that really teach you about what is required to be successful just based on your own experience obviously a little bit of risk a little bit of a lot of action but what do you think allowed you to have a hundred million dollar exit at thirty one years old outside of your parents influences first of all i had a partner so we had to split that i just shouldn't say that but my partner was twice my age my partner was actually my father's age and we were fifty fifty partners we started when i was twenty five and he was fifty seven and in a sense he became the father i didn't have although i had a father he became the brother i didn't have although i had a brother and he became my best friend and mentor too so probably the most one of the most powerful lessons from that experience was the power of partnership most of the things that i've accomplished in life i've done in one type of partnership or another and i think part of that is that i'm aware that i have certain skills that are either unique or in short supply but i'm also aware that i have blind spots and the weaknesses and when i can find a partner that i can divide and each of us can complement the other very often that's a one plus one equals three kind of situation so the first ones that i had an amazing partner the second which has proven to be true over my life is you have to have real conviction you have to have a point of view when we bought that project we lost money for the five or six years that we owned it but we knew we were creating value or we believed we were creating value and in time and time again what distinguishes many of the greatest entrepreneurs is the ability to delay gratification because you have to keep investing back in a business or you have to stop looking elsewhere you have to just focus on what you're doing in one case i owned a solar lighting business for twenty five years and i had a un blemish track record of twenty five years of straight losses but eventually i found a company to merge it with and then during the next five years that new new combined business made up for all those losses and more but not many people have the fort to wait twenty five years to do something so delayed gratification and the other thing is that for people who've have gone to business school or red business literature there's this notion of efficient markets and efficient markets says if this was such a big opportunity the market would have already reflected it so therefore it must not be a big opportunity but anybody who's been a successful entrepreneur realizes is that they've seen opportunities perhaps that nobody else has seen and you have to really convince yourself that there's something there i think the last thing i would say is that when you're starting something from scratch an idea like a apple in a garage or a bill gates or whatever it is that's what real estate people would call greenfield development starting with an empty piece a lot and doing something that's different than buying an existing building i was buying a building that was the largest building of its type in the world when it was built in nineteen thirty but it was a white elephant as an industrial building and i think the way that i've tried to explain it to people is i was buying an unfinished office building and the sellers were selling underutilized warehouse when a seller is selling something because of how they understand that product and the buyer can see something completely different and see the value our value was made on the buy because if you figured out what it took to upgrade and renovate an an an old warehouse it was a lot cheaper than building the building from scratch in this particular case and so we were looking at what it would be worth as a finished office building and what did it take to get there so very often particularly in real estate but but not only when you can buy something that the seller is in selling they think they're selling one thing and you see another use for it sometimes that's where great opportunity lies this is always an interesting conversation because i work with and work with i interview a lot of exited entrepreneurs and they all more or less echo the same sentiment that that you've spoken about where you feel off like after the exit you feel like the rug pulled out from underneath you and you try and figure out what's next in your life and really this is the the the premise for tiger obviously at the time tiger did not exist yet but i'm curious what that walk through for people that are listening for entrepreneurs that are building what you experienced when you sold for over a hundred million obviously yeah you split it fifty fifty but still you know an incredible amount of an incredible amount of you know wealth is created all of a sudden now you have more money in your bank than you've ever had before but you're still going through this transition period so when that happens when that transaction happens what do you feel yeah so what i wanna say is that for entrepreneurs who have had the good fortune of having a successful exit something magic happens in the moment that the deal closes and it's like going through the looking glass because you go from having a hundred or a thousand employees to maybe having an assistant or no one and as we like to say everybody used to laugh at your jokes and now there's nobody to laugh at your jokes anymore and you go from owning a business to having a large bank account but all of a sudden issues of legacy health meaning and what's next all come into being and what we've created tiger twenty one for is primarily that moment when all of these changes occur in my case there's obviously a big difference when you have a liquidity when you're thirty one than when you're almost seventy and when i was thirty one i wasn't thinking i didn't have any children i wasn't thinking about legacy i wasn't sure i'm not even sure i'd heard the word wealth preservation i just assumed if i had had this extraordinary success by thirty one i could just keep doing it again and again because how we how hard was that then of course life taught me a few lessons it's not as easy as you think so one of the biggest decisions that entrepreneurs have to make is after they have one success is do they have another one in them do they have a a desire to do it again if you're sixty five or seventy or eighty you're not likely to be doing it again if you're thirty or thirty five you might be but in my case i just assumed i would keep doing deals and i didn't think much about wealth preservation so i invested in a couple of deals and one of those deals went south you know nobody bats a thousand and one of the problems with first time entrepreneurs who are successful is they rarely appreciate how lucky they've been they assume it's all their skill and they they'll just keep doing it again so there's a false confidence that comes when luck is smiles on you and you have a great first fortune so after i had my first fortune in in harbors side i should cry to create a new company that didn't work and after five years i had to throw in the towel of that company and realize why was i successful in the first case but not successful in the next case and it took a lot of personal intros intersection to think about what the product services the way i manage people where my strengths were and so when i did it a third time then it was the third times the charm because that was even more successful than harbors side but there's nothing more dangerous than a young entrepreneur who's been incredibly successful who thinks it came so easy it'll just keep going easy it it just doesn't work out that way was there a specific incident or thing that went wrong or investment i mean you mentioned your second company didn't work out but was there a really really sort of traumatic event that made you realize okay i need to create a community for people that have had exits to support each other was there like one particular event that led to tiger twenty one yeah what happened was i tried to build that second company it it wasn't a real estate company it was a real estate information company and if you know what zillow is today we basically created something similar to zillow but before the internet and instead of zillow whose customers are consumers who are looking at the price of a home our customers were the real estate brokers who were serving so brokers could look up line for much of that information and the problem was that registered brokers where our customers and during the iraq war the economy went backwards in america and half of the real estate brokers in america deli listed meaning they weren't making enough money to keep their licenses going so the real estate brokerage community shrank by half in a one or two year period well our customers were real estate brokers it's hard to build a business when half your customers go away so one thing that it taught me is sometimes markets just work against you you it's tough to fight a market some some companies will succeed in anything but others are dependent on having markets and many people who have been successful because the market has been kind to them don't realize how lucky they've been to have been doing whatever they were doing in a period where the market was very kind to them and then all of a sudden it turns and it it the market isn't as kind and so that second business the market turned against us and you know i'm not sure i managed it all that well i'm not suggesting it was perfectly run in fact i learned that i was not as good a manager as i was an entrepreneur i had a remote business in atlanta and i didn't have any of the skills that worked for me when i was managing people in person to be able to influence people that were a thousand miles away and so what happened was i went backwards i had made a lot of money when i was thirty and now i had less of it by the time i was thirty five because i had lost money on this company and i woke up one day and realized that while none of these things were all that likely to happen i could imagine ten things that if they all went wrong i would have lost most of my money whereas i had just given up a small amount of it and it scared the be jesus out of me i didn't know what i i i couldn't imagine that i would go that far backwards so i started a company called ms em m e my initials are ms it also means truth in hebrew and started buying distressed real estate and built a billion dollar portfolio where we delivered thirty eight percent returns to our investors and had an extraordinary success that was one of my career highs but when i sold emi i said you know i had that first success when i was thirty one and then i went backwards during the middle part of my thirties and now i'm forty three and selling my second success i don't wanna ever have to go backwards again i don't wanna ever have to start a fourth company to try and make up the losses had a smart people when they've been smart enough to have a great success learn how to both pursue new opportunities after they've sold their business but preserve capital how do they balance those type of issues and that was really what tiger was about it was trying to learn from people who were smarter than me or it had experiences that i hadn't had how do we how do we learn so that i could continue moving my career forward but not jeopardize the wealth that i had created so that i went back to square one nets sweet is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if you ask nine experts you're gonna get ten answers bull market bear market interest rates are rising they're falling honestly at the end of the day we just need a crystal ball but until then over forty two thousand businesses have trusted and future proof themselves with nets sweet by oracle the number one cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory in hr into one cohesive platform with one unified business management suite there's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control that you need to make quick decisions with real time insights and forecasting bringing you're pairing into the future with actionable data and when you're 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want faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs plus with indeed sponsor jobs there's no monthly subscription no long term contracts you only pay for results there's no need to wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash cla right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed of dot com slash clarity terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need it's really interesting because that out of every single person i i've spoken to that sells a business that is such a a common sentiment just the absolute fear they're gonna screw it up somehow and and it's it's ridiculous to think that you could screw everything up but you get in your head about what was this a one time thing is there a chance it's gonna go to zero what if i make the wrong investment and this is i don't think before tiger twenty one there was really a a group i think it was very lonely on the other side of an exit and it's hard for people to understand it's really hard for understand yeah it's it's terribly lonely because all of a sudden you might have created a lot of wealth and some people may know what you created but you're having all these challenges and they're really quite daunting but everybody is saying oh i wish i had those problems well maybe but when you have those problems those are your problems and first and foremost is children how do you not allow your success to screw up your children and how do you give your children a chance to grow and mature on their own without being overwhelmed by their parents success so that they can enjoy it on their own so there's and and the other thing is that you know one of the things that we've learned over the years is if you're neither an entrepreneur nor an investor they seem like the same thing they're just people managing money and assets making money it's kind of like the es have nine words for snow to you and i maybe it's just that white fluffy stuff but the es have real expertise to distinguish between different types of snow and the difference between an investor and an entrepreneur is night and day if you're an investor or an entrepreneur but not to anybody else who is not involved in either you know investors are quite dis dispatch they have to be across a portfolio of things an entrepreneurs generally quite emotionally tied up in the one thing that they're working on so they over concentrate but they're lucky enough not all entrepreneurs who concentrate on one thing are successful but most of the successful entrepreneurs have concentrated on one thing and milk it for all its worth for ten or twenty or thirty years so concentration risk is a problem every investor knows but the most successful entrepreneurs think that's the way to go and you know most entrepreneurs who love what they're doing and that's where the most successful entrepreneurs are really don't wanna sell their asset something happens and they might be forced to sell or there might be a health issue or it just might be an offer that you can't refuse but it's a very emotional decision for most investors they try not to get too emotionally involved in any one of their positions so that when it reaches the level it's supposed to they say it's time to sell and move on to the next investment so there are a lot of differences you know one of the little secrets of tiger is that we should really say we take some of the world's best entrepreneurs and turn them into mediocre investors because if we didn't they turn out to be terrible investors as it turns out we have a lot of great investors in tiger and some of the entrepreneurs have figured out how to be great investors but on average the transition of being a great entrepreneur to becoming a competent if not great investor is a huge shock it takes one average three to five years for a really great entrepreneur to become a competent investor and obviously within there there's some great investors that come out of that when you when you speak to an entrepreneur that's had that first exit what's your advice to them to help them transition from entrepreneur into investors so they don't make foolish mistakes when they join tiger twenty one so first of all you have to do some personal intros fiction it doesn't matter whether it's psychiatry or meditation or whatever it is that allows you to learn more about yourself but you really have to ask yourself do i think that the skills that i brought to this entrepreneurial success would allow me to do it again or was i lucky enough that maybe i should count myself lucky and now think about being an investor so you have to know yourself do you first of all if you're thirty that question might be very different than if you're seventy if you're seventy even if you thought you could do it you might not wanna do it so this this notion of knowing yourself are you fundamentally an investor or an entrepreneur in your personality type is really important to kind of explore and the other is to say you know part of what we're talking about is something that we call sticker shock most entrepreneurs overestimate the value of the money that they'll have after they sell they forget that they'll have to pay taxes and then they forget that once they pay taxes they're going to earn a return that's so much less as an investor than they earned as an entrepreneur that sometimes their income literally goes down fifty sixty seventy percent simply because if you were earning twenty percent as an entrepreneur and then you pay taxes and you're earning three or four or five percent it's obviously an awful lot less income and your lifestyle changes so when you sell a business it's not necessarily to give you more annual free cash flow it's to take risk off the table and would you rather have risk off the table but not as much cash flow the business doesn't cover your expenses if it did it doesn't send you on vacations if it did whatever whatever that was going on in your business but obviously at different levels you might have enough one of the big surprises people learn is that tiger members on average live on about two percent of their net worth obviously there many different variations because some people have different types of income but as a rule of thumb two percent is a number well that's a real shock if you sold your business for ten million dollars you probably were living on an awful lot more than two hundred thousand a year but once you have ten million dollars if you're living on more than two hundred thousand a year you won't be able to preserve your capital you might spend down and if you're seventy and you're say i'm gonna live to ninety over twenty years well maybe you can live on two hundred and fifty thousand or three hundred thousand and still have a dollar when you die but it's quite shocking to most people what the change is when you're living off passive income i'll just give one other example being an entrepreneur breeds lousy investors because when you own a business and it's throwing off money each year and then you invest that money if the investment went bad you don't care about it because next year the business will throw off more money and you can make an investment so when you're at a cocktail party you don't have to tell anybody about the the b that you made you can just talk about the winners as if you're a genius but once you sell your business and there's no repetitive fountain of cash when you lose principal by losing money in an investment there's no way to replenish that cash there's no business to fill that up so the skills that many people as entrepreneurs have as investors are sloppy un investing and that's sure to get you in a lot of trouble once you no longer have the business to replenish your losses when you i know that you do a portfolio defense with all of your members maybe describe what that is briefly but also i wanna i wanna understand what comes out of that portfolio portfolio defense in terms of best practices percentage allocations just averages obviously everyone's gonna be different but for the most successful right the people that have figured it out i know that all the different asset classes right the crypto the private equity the real estate that everything i wanna understand what the best in the world they're doing yeah so once a year if you're a tiger member you belong to a group there's twelve or fifteen people in the group you meet once a month and therefore each month one person does a portfolio defense they've worked on it for a month they've pulled all their information together many times people are understanding this information literally for the first time you can't imagine people don't know what they're worth what all their assets are how they're allocated they often don't share it excuse me with their spouse or even their advisors because they don't want their advisors to know what they have or whatever but in tiger this is the opportunity to get twelve people whose agenda there is to share their knowledge with you to not to not sell you on anything but to employ the collective knowledge so when you show a portfolio and you talk about the philosophy of how you've constructed your portfolio two amazing questions in the portfolio defense who is this wealth meant to support well some people say my family that's my husband or my wife and i some people say it's from my wife or husband and i and our children some people say oh well we're supporting our in laws or we're supporting our sisters and brothers everybody and others say it's to support the people in my church or my synagogue or at my college alma mater people define the purpose of their wealth very differently and you have to start with understanding what people's purposes for their wealth and a second question is if the markets were to go down or your net worth were to go down twenty percent or fifty percent what would you do and some people say i wouldn't change anything because i live conservatively and some people would say well i'd have to do this that or the other these are the kind of questions but basically when you show your portfolio it reveals in almost every case a bias or a blind spot some person might not have enough cash because they're just assuming the equities will be fine but in a market crash maybe you need to have cash that's why tiger members on average over the last fifteen years carry about twelve percent cash very little debt and twelve percent cash and if you go back to the two percent i was talking about that means in the worst of cases you might have six years of living expenses it doesn't quite work out that way probably three or four years in any case but the point is that history has shown that when you're forced to sell assets to raise cash when the market is down that's the worst time to sell and if you can have enough cash to weather the storm then you're not forced to liquid could liquidate discounts which really takes a hit to your portfolio and obviously if you have cash when the market goes down you can buy opportunities you couldn't not otherwise buy so in simple answer our members have ten or twelve percent cash our members have twenty eight percent in private equity twenty eight percent in real estate and only twenty four percent in public equity that's a very unusually low allocation but our members are all the great entrepreneurs so they made it in private equity or private ownership of businesses or private real estate so it's no surprise that even after they sell that's what they wanna invest in but i think the bigger thing that is important is between the twenty eight twenty eight and twenty four that adds up to eighty percent of our member's assets are in long biased assets that's a very long term bullish feeling doesn't mean anything about what they think the market will be this year or next it just says over the long term owning businesses in real estate is where wealth has been preserved and created are there are there any alternative investments that the wealthiest is and actually you know it's really good we didn't even we didn't even pin it a number on it what is the average net worth of a tiger member so people can just really understand the the the the amounts we're dealing with here to to be a tiger member you have to be managing between twenty million and a billion of personal net worth and the average tiger member is managing about a hundred and thirty million of personal net worth do you see a high net worth ultra high net worth investing in alternative assets like i mentioned crypto before or anything else that anything else that would be interesting to them totally first of all the fact that twenty eight percent is in private equity is out of all proportion to what a typical wealth management firm would recommend because our members are entrepreneurs who created wealth they're more comfortable having the ill liquid investments and within private equity of course the biggest part the reason it grew over fifteen years from ten percent of our portfolios to twenty eight percent is that venture capital has been a growing section my guess is fifteen years ago venture capital was almost nothing and today it probably is quarter or a third or a fourth of the total private equity allocation so percentage wise it's grown tremendously so that's one area gold has typically been a one to three percent asset obviously this year it's done something extraordinary in the last year because of concerns about the dollar and the us economy and we have some real bitcoin and digital currency rock stars who are members some of the members leading funds that are in crypto and some of the world's leading experts we have many many members who have millions and tens of millions and likely hundreds of millions of bitcoin and some of the other cryptocurrencies but it's still at this point as best we can tell if of the sixteen hundred it would be a small percentage of it who are real devote so in the aggregate it's about a one to three percent asset as well and because our members have about two hundred billion under management you know at three percent that would suggest we own about six percent i'm sorry six billion of cryptocurrency not insignificant but you know there's a a race going on now between bitcoin and gold which is the better store house of value the traditional tend to lean towards gold probably are younger members but not only younger members like the digital features of of bitcoin and the fact that you can you know put it in a bitcoin wallet and it's totally portable and is really a way to to protect against currency devaluation and other state concerns that many bitcoin owners have when you think about coming into a a significant amount of wealth you mentioned one of the major concerns is is children and you know how do you how do you make sure you don't screw up your kids so i think that what would be really interesting is just to understand for people that have made a significant sum of money from an exit when you think about family and legacy and children and even you mentioned before which i find super interesting some people don't even talk to their partner or their spouse about how much money they've made or i guess how they allocate it what are some of the biggest concerns outside of investment we've covered investment obviously that's major but family it's kids wife husband what are people worried about without doubt the number one concern across tiger members is how do i both not screw up and at the same time provide for my children and those are conflicting the more you provide the more you might be screwing up your kids so what's that perfect balance and it generally breaks down into two very different approaches one approach is to give your kids very little in their early years so that they can become independent and successful in their own right and in that philosophy probably you're waiting till the kids are somewhere between twenty five and thirty maybe even older than thirty before you fully disclose to them what you're worth the philosophy being that if i told them how much i'm worth and how much they're likely to inherit it would dis them from finding their own path to success there's not a lot of evidence that that's exactly right but it might be approximately right and just to give you an idea my best guess is about seventy percent of tiger members follow that approach because they don't want their wealth to get in the way of their children forming their own identities their own careers their own success about thirty percent of our members and it probably skews towards the wealthier end of our membership say that our kids are gonna inherit so much money that i'd rather teach them about money teach them how to be stewards of the wealth they'll eventually inherit and you have to start that from an early age because it takes a long time for people to really master the concepts and understand the impact if you're of the seventy percent and you never tell your kids what they're gonna inherit maybe they're making decisions that stop them from becoming a priest or a rabbi or a community service or a researcher or a public servant because they don't know have the the resources they don't know they have the resources that would allow them to do that on the other hand if you give your kids too much money maybe it could demo motivate them from having the passion to try and create success on their own so there's no perfect answer part of it is your own philosophy and part of it is knowing your kids but there's you know obviously successes where kids created their own independence and only later found out they were inheriting wealth and there also great successes where kids learned what they were going to inherit and that enabled them to make decisions that could benefit society or make their lives fuller and that it didn't in any way stunt their growth so it it really depends on what your philosophy is but the one thing that we know from kids is that at least in your will you better be treating your kids equally or you're gonna leave some deep emotional scars if you leave more to one or the other with one exception if you have a deeply held family value and you talk about that value over many years with your children then they can understand why the value overwhelm the equality so if you wanna leave a trust for children who go into the clergy or a trust for kill children who become public school teachers or a trust for somebody who preserves the family farm there are a number of these kinds of exclusions where you talk about our family value is the farm that your grandfather or great grandfather had or we we would love you to become a public servant the kennedy were p reported to have trust for any kennedy that went into public service so if you can do that but during your children's life it's not as clear that it has to be equal it's some some family say it's each kid according to his need if a one kid wants to start a business and you wanna lend the money to start a business and another one wants to buy a home each is according to their need and as long as there's a basic equity and the kids feel that they're being addressed it doesn't leave the kind of emotional scars that if if one kid is treated one way in another kid treated another what about the spouse because that's also hopefully everyone's happy but i'm assuming that there's still some some things that people have to think about or at want to think about when they come into a huge amount of money i think what i wanna say is that there's no way to answer what kind of information should be shared between spouses without getting into how many variations of a marriage or a relationship are there because we have many members who have created significant wealth sometimes before they got married sometimes after and their spouses have no idea whatsoever of what their worth i was in a portfolio defense of a man who was in his mid sixties and it only told his wife recently that the level of wealth that they had obviously she knew they had enough wealth to support their lifestyle but had no way to put a number on it and apparently was never interested to know that's curious to me i would i personally would wanna know but that's that's that's my own predisposition but i hear stories about tiger members whose spouses have no idea what the scale of their wealth is and spouses who are one hundred percent partners in the sense that they know everything and and they actually jointly feel like the sacrifices they made ent them both to that wealth and it's harder for me to draw any perfect conclusions you all want a perfect marriage but we know that over half the marriages in america and and divorce today anyway so i i i'm a little it's a little tougher i i know that in my case my spouse has access to everything that i have and i have access to everything that she has that's the nature of our relationship and most of the people i know but i do see it all over the place nets sweet is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if you ask nine experts are gonna get ten answers bull market bear market interest rates are rising they're falling honestly at the end of the day we just need a crystal ball but until then over forty two thousand businesses have trusted and future proof themselves with nets suite by oracle the number one cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory in hr into one cohesive platform with one unified business management suite there's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control that you 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stand out and hire fast and with sponsor jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want fast and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs plus with indeed sponsor jobs there's no monthly subscription no long term contracts you only pay for results there's no need to wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash cla right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash cla terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need it's just interesting i feel like i i think the lessons are with a lot of these a lot of these like learnings because again there's so much there's so much variation across the board but i think the lessons are a lot of intros spectrum and i would say a lot of communication and i think that those two things are just good habits i know that you i mean even i think at some point in your life you practiced a lot of meditation and and then you abandoned it came back to it but you've mentioned meditation you've mentioned intros these are all great tools to understand yourself and if you don't understand yourself when you come into a massive windfall a massive amount of wealth i'm assuming that that is the most dangerous situation when you don't know what you would be happy with what you would not be happy with what you'd like to communicate to your spouse what they want to hear what i don't know i just feel like a lot of intros intersection is need have you thought about this like this psychological work have i thought about it that's what i've been doing for twenty six years gonna say you thought about that just give you yeah i'll i'll give you an example of a member who did a portfolio defense and when i met him ten or fifteen years ago it it could be any number but let's say he was worth ten million dollars and then he said you know i i just for whatever reason i'd like to be worth twenty million and then everything will be okay and when he got to be worth twenty million all he wanted to be worth was forty million and the minute he was worth forty he was reaching for a hundred and you know we can all find ourself on that endless rat mill you know the the circuit what's it called the like the treadmill treadmill yeah rat race treadmill yeah rat race and you know there's this fundamental question is when is enough enough and it has nothing to do with the number because you could leave a lead a great life if you had a million dollars or ten million or a hundred million or a billion and i can give you many examples of people who have the hundred or a billion who aren't leading a great life so it's it's not it's all about how you think about it but some of us are sort of programmed for whatever reason that wherever we are we're just striving for a little more it's not a bad thing that's what makes great entrepreneurs keep going is balance important or are there seasons of your life where it is required to be imbalance to achieve this level of success meaning i've always thought that at some point it is good to focus on your health and your relationships but i know a lot of people that don't while they're in the t of building they seem to put everything else to the side just in pursuit of the business goal do you see that to be the the the north a great it's it's such a great question i think it affects each person differently you know you i hope the analogy i'm gonna make make some sense because i've known people who were not philanthropic during their life and yet when they died they left a foundation and either their children or their heirs allowed that foundation to do extraordinary good you know warren buffett for many years said he was gonna keep his money because he was earning more than any foundation could and when he died he'd leave the money to the foundation but then his friend bill gates convinced him yeah but if your money saves a life today how much more valuable is it than saving another life twenty years from now and apparently warren buffett gave about half of his wealth i don't remember the exact number to the gates foundation many years ago so the answer is you know a life well lived follows many definitions but one of those lives is you know a relationship what what's the nature of your relationship i was very fortunate to have a wife whose father was also an entrepreneur and i worked extraordinary amounts traveled and wasn't home for dinner and was on the road and she was incredibly supportive so one of the big lessons that comes out of the book that i wrote about entrepreneurs is who's who's your significant other if you're pursuing goals one way and your significant other is not digging that liking that then that's harder for you to do it so one of the things you have to look at in choosing a life partner is will that person accommodate to your ambitions and you to theirs it takes two to tango obviously so the the question that you're talking about a balance i i don't one of the most depressing things that ever happened to me in a tiger meeting is we were talking to a man who was worth thirty million dollars and we were asking him about we talk about phil we try not to judge but we try and share information and when i asked him what his philanthropic budget was he said oh i i don't have a philanthropic budget philanthropist is for the wealthy people and i wanted to say you're worth thirty million dollars how much more wealthy do you have to be i know some great philanthropist who aren't even worth a million dollars but they give a portion of their income and they give a portion of their time so i i think phil philanthropist in particular when you're talking about balance i'm always more interested in meeting somebody who has some element of gratitude because if they've made it to a tiger table and they haven't achieve some level of gratitude i don't think that they're appreciating how much good fortune they've had to get to that table you always meet people with a chip on their shoulder but when somebody thinks that their wealth that they've created doesn't come because they've been helped along the way and because they've had some luck i find to be sometimes one dimensional and i wanna work with people who have a a certain modi come of gratitude and a sense of wanting to have an impact on the community that they're in and appreciate even the workers who supported their success and that makes for a a more whole person in my mind but you know comes comes with all all different stripes no i agree i mean i i that you're you're very you worded that very nicely i also i also really dislike when people consider themselves self made because that means that they didn't have customers or investors or friends or peers or and it doesn't in my opinion that doesn't exist it doesn't exist there's always someone else who's been part of your journey but if you think about you know forget to forget the forget the people if i could i'm sorry to interrupt no no you're fine i'm sorry i mean you what when you talk about part of your journey one of the greatest lessons that i've learned is the role of mentors and if you take a hundred people in any profession and line them up from least successful to most successful using any reasonable definition of success money number of papers published friends i don't know what it is any reasonable the half that are most successful will overwhelmingly have had mentors in their life and the half that are least successful will overwhelmingly have excuses for why they don't have mentors in their life and something you just said reminded me that when you asked me before about some of the lessons that i learned i've been blessed with five or six or seven mentors in my life that every one of them sort of lifted me up one rung on the ladder in terms of my ability or my perspective and i try and do that with younger people as well how would you for somebody who's listening right now how would you advise them on finding mentors do you recommend they find people that are far more advanced people that are have just accomplished what they're looking to accomplish people that are you know kind of in their peer group that are on the same level to hold them accountable how do you look at mentors and and peers mentors come in all stripes and all colors and all flavors but basically it's generally within the human spirit to want to have a mentor and to be a mentor and what people say when they can't find a mentor they just haven't been looking because i i think that if you're somebody who yourself who you are a decent honorable person of integrity and ambition and kindness for lack of a better way of saying it it's almost inc that if you ask two or three or four reasonable candidates one of them won't in one way or another wanna become your mentor and that's just the the nature of the human experience and mentors can make all the difference in a person's life i i always mostly had mentors that were very approximately my father's age whether that's a coincidence or not i don't know but i was looking for people who had achieved some kind of success in some field and had some persona to me that felt balanced or insightful or kind and i just wanted to know what made them tick but i was looking for people that had really different kinds of success that i could learn from and i just think it's one of the most one of the least understood most important phenomenon of almost any young person's success young or old you're never too old for a mentor i i have a i have a close friend of mine who's ninety six years old and i'm gonna be seventy we met because we were both on the board of an organization called business executives for national security that was trying to help frame our national security and i i can't do the math but when i was thirty i guess he was fifty six and we spent the weekend on an aircraft carrier sharing a bunk and here we are forty years later from that weekend that started on a bunk and i still go out to see him every couple months to be showered with his perspective and wisdom it's been a source of inspiration for many years for me first of all how important is meditation for an entrepreneur or somebody who's trying to be successful and if not meditation then what other practices do you think are very useful i think you have to start with a kind of perspective of the way our minds work it's it's when somebody says i'm of two minds or there was a very famous book by dan danny con who's a nobel prize winner called thinking fast and slow the way we've evolved is our brains is are actually the combination of a rep till brain that evolved into a mammal brain and then human aspects so they're different parts of our brain sometimes it's the conscious and unconscious but the point is most people there's some aspect of their thinking where there's a process going on in the background where you're kind of thinking about problems but it's not in the foreground and the two are quite separate but when you can find ways to connect that background or that unconscious to the conscious and sometimes it happens through meditation sometimes it happens through therapy very often it happens when people are taking a shower have you ever heard the story oh i was in the shower and i got an idea came into my head there different ways some people do it with exercise and so the the the point is that anything that allows you to connect the different parts of your brain into a functioning hole sometimes is like a bridge that connects two ideas when i'm meditating it's not like i'm thinking about a problem i'm trying to have my mind blank but that blank opens a door to that part of the brain that's thinking about that problem that i wasn't even aware of and a solution comes in to a problem that's i'm working on but not at that moment but in my life it's no different than somebody says i had an idea for a new product in the shower well in the back of their mind their their brain was working so it doesn't really matter whether it's you take a hot shower every morning or you and and spend a half an hour just relaxing or you're meditating or you're in therapy some people say there's some aspect to it for a runner high when the end fins occur so there's lots of ways to access the whole mind most of the time we're conscious we're just in the conscious mind and that's not where our best thoughts or our deepest connections come from and when you can access that deeper connection sometimes you're able to have levels of creativity or problem solving that wouldn't otherwise occur to you and i found that that there's another aspect in meditation that probably is elsewhere too the buddhist have a term called the observing mind and that's when you're in an experience most of us are in it at the moment but a well trained buddhist is both in it and observing it and sometimes you experience an emotion i'm sure i'm not the only person that sometimes comes into a room and for one reason another and feel a little insecure because people there are more successful than me or better looking or more accomplished or whatever it is and that creates a nervous and i start talking blah blah blah blah blah an observing mine says are you aware that you're behaving in a way that is consistent within insecurity and when you can name it it tends to dissipate so this notion of having an observing mind are in interactions when you're talking to people when you're with people is just a way to allow people to master their emotions so that their emotions don't drive them to behave in ways that might be seen as counterproductive do you feel like that is something that you've developed at a at a later stage in your life or is this something that you've pursued purposefully to help sort of optimize your cognitive performance your your reaction there's obviously many successful people who don't meditate and haven't been to therapy and again there's many unsuccessful people that have so there there there no absolute but i believe that the people who i know who try and access these subconscious unconscious hidden thoughts and integrate them into their behavior and their thinking are generally happier people or people who have more gratitude and i'm not gonna say more successful but i'd like to believe that it aids in success it certainly has for me if i tell you the number of times i'm i i happen to be a almost daily medi i often get up at four thirty in the morning not to meditate i just get up and i can't go back to sleep so i'll go meditate for forty five minutes and during those sessions i can't tell you how many times i've i've been on that for about the last fifteen years i think and i can't tell you how many times i've been working on a problem but not that day it wasn't even on my mind when i was meditating but out of the blue a solution comes and i said oh my god why didn't i think of that before that's so clear and you know it could be do i take this direction or that direction or i'm in a negotiation and i can't break a break it up and and and get it going and it it just it it's happened dozens and dozens of times and when i say dozens of dozens of times that mean it doesn't happen every day it doesn't happen every week sometimes it doesn't happen every month but i've had so many breakthroughs in getting such perfect clarity that weather again it's meditation which works for me analysis it's a form of therapy i've done that as well for many years different people do it for different reasons but i find it's just a way to be in touch with who i am and maximize my performance have you ever fallen into the trap of having your identity so wrapped up into your business that it actually hurts your how do you and what's your recommendation for entrepreneurs that do have their identity wrapped up in their financial success i i've had my identity wrapped up in every business i've been involved with at harbors side i used to think of the word harbors side with a vine growing around it that was my identity because that's how wrapped up i was in it and the you know with tiger it's different because i'm lucky to be surrounded by a team of a hundred and fifty people of extraordinary talent sixteen hundred incredible members but i'm the face of tiger i'm the one who does the tv and most of the new shows and podcast podcasts as well and so i'm associated with tiger a lot but i am finding that when i was thirty and i was tied up with harbors herbicide which was the largest commercial development in the country at the time i thought appropriate for my first real estate project i i found that a real loss of identity when i sold it tiger while i'm very involved with it it feels different i'll be seventy in october feels differently when i think about all the things that i've done although tiger is probably the one that will have the most lasting legacy of course other than my children but the the this issue most entrepreneurs are tied up because as i said before they're emotional they're this is their baby they're they're they're wrapping themselves around it and the only the only thing is just like any love affair it can be healthy and it can be unhealthy and trying to figure out when that identity that's tied up is healthy because it's making the business more successful while making you feel better about yourself that's good but if it's you know if it's sucking the lifeblood blood out of you and causing you to do bad things or counterproductive things or unhealthy things then it's not good it's it's all very case specific and it's a trap that's too easy to fall into what are the biggest regrets of the members of tiger twenty one that they when they look back on their life you know i i'm sure that there's it's it's fantastic question i i think that what i would say is i hate to use the word regret if you second guess what the mistakes where you can't ever know whether history if you got if if you did the thing you forgot you did or you wanted to do whether it would have been turned out better or not there's you know life is you know unexpectedly good things happen and and bad things happen and you have to make the best of it but i when somebody asked me i i i don't ask many people who out regrets but for me i don't have any because if i told you i wish i did this or i wish i did that i actually have no basis to know that it would've have turned out any better i'll just give you one example i am an entrepreneur i'm a small time entrepreneur that's been successful a couple times but each time i start i restart with planting a new seed i don't buy large companies i start something over and over again and what that means is i pretty much sold every business i ever built too soon because once it grows into a tree i'm not that interested in pruning trees i'm interested in planting seeds and growing new trees and another way of saying it is that my particular passion is around the act of creation what i love to do is to create things to have an idea that people say couldn't be done i'm like many entrepreneurs and to prove them that it can be done tiger was an example people can't imagine you could build a business off of what we do and banker said it wouldn't happen when i did that first project it was an old warehouse and an abandoned area and nobody believed you could turned it into a modern office complex so my point is that sometimes people say you know if you hadn't sold each of those businesses you'd be a lot wealthier today and i'd say maybe that's true but i wouldn't have had the quality of life i've had and i wouldn't have had the ability to start the next thing and have the pleasure and the pain of starting things and seeing what's successful so i i think there's just so many situations where regret is just a counterproductive thing that you have to weed out wherever you are you can make the best of where you are and look forward not backwards because that's all you can affect i love it where i know that your book think bigger that's available everywhere you can get books amazon etcetera etcetera if people wanna connect with you where would you wanna send them any social website that we can put in the in the show notes below you know the tiger twenty one website i don't do a lot of social media per s i barely have enough time to brush my teeth at the end of a day and i'm i'm i'm not of that il i i also think that i have some questions about whether all of social media particularly among teenagers but also among voters is a productive force in our society and as a personal habit i don't engage in a lot of social media but i'm at you know w w o w tiger twenty one dot com and i'm easy to get a hold of google last thing i like to ask you've given over so much days so thank you for coming on i really appreciate it i always like to ask the last question out of all the things that you've learned in your life say you could only pass on one lesson to your children the most important lesson that you've ever learned what would that lesson be and why what comes to mind is it sort of be grateful find the the wonderful things that you can you have can and can benefit from and be true to yourself i think that i think so many people imagine that there are truths that are independent of who they are as opposed to who they affect them each of us is different each of us has an identity and the extent to which we can know ourselves and then act accordingly i think is a pretty great guide for moving forward

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there in this lessons episode explore why work remains essential even when survival no longer depends on it discover how purpose and community drive people to seek meaning beyond financial need understand why true fulfillment comes from creation and contribution rather than wealth uncover strategies for turning bold ideas into innovations that thrive in a competitive market if you didn't wanna work in theory there's so many in in most in most western countries there's so many social welfare programs that you could sit on your couch all day and not work and still find a way to get money from somewhere to be quite honest and some people do that but i think the vast majority of people would much maybe it's because society impose you know like these these ideas of what you should do and and you know you mentioned like you have to provide and whatnot but like for for most people you're not gonna be rich but you don't have to work to to live day to day but people do choose to work they do it because what we value more than the job is we value people are social animals like if you think about human beings you know in the hunter gather for you know tens of thousands of years they just hunted when they needed food or gathered stuff when they needed food but most of the time their their value wasn't on their value was on how they relate and what they give to their community and fundamentally we all live in this community the social structure and that social structure is informing us how to feel about ourselves and that social structure will change with time and it will free people up to do things with their time like right now you're saying some most of the hardest people i know the work the hardest are like super rich but like they they could stop working tomorrow right yeah it's like they aren't working for more money they don't need more money like you look at any of these rich people they work like you elon musk does he need more money no he no need for more money bill you know bill gates is working like crazy but now he's working on his phil like crazy he's so he puts in the hours he's putting in these people work we don't work we work because what are we gonna do right work creates meaning in our life that's why we don't work for the money so the people who think that the welfare is gonna make people lazy i just don't believe it's true i mean if people are gonna be lazy they'll be lazy right yeah they'll be lazy on the job or off the job if they're the type who doesn't wanna do anything then that's how they're programmed you're not gonna change them and if they're the type who are gonna if if if they're the type like us who just love doing stuff love creating stuff love you know it doesn't matter we're gonna we're gonna figure out something to do with our time yeah and they're gonna do it yeah i think my i think my my issue is i always try and figure out i always try and take on too many things as as hobbies and and i have to remember that sometimes they're hobbies you had no day job you would i guarantee you you would be busier than ever just you'd be like on this i wanna do that i wanna do this and and i think most people who wanna be busy will be busy and those who just wanna sit around and you know play games or watch television they they could do that right yeah know yeah you do that now every chance they get they'll still do the same thing people do what they do yeah i wanna ask a question just the first book that you wrote make elephants fly what is that what is the book about and this is not a plug i didn't plan this at all i was curious about the title all you chose that title the elephant well i like fun titles so the elephant it's called make elephants fly the title is what it's about it's called the process of radical innovation and radical innovation is a innovation not incremental like not a little innovation but a huge leap for so how do you get there so the elephant for entrepreneurs it's your big idea it's your dream it's like what you wanna do but it's an elephant how elephants don't fly how can you get this huge idea off the ground so the book tells you how to come from an idea all the way to execution how to take that idea and make it fly so let's speak about that let's speak with that because let's speak about it in the context of i have a hobby i'm i'm working you know i'm working full time and i'm i'm using myself as an as an example but a lot of people have these side hustle right now yeah even especially even more if you have more free time because you're stuck at home and you don't have anywhere else to go so people are starting i i've i've never seen so many live instagram sessions live facebook sessions before in my life i feel like everybody's just starting something new now so it's good but okay so you have an idea you have a side hustle how do you take that and you turn it into a flying elephant so this is all about the process of innovating right figuring out where your idea meets reality so it's in a way a process starting with the idea there's a lot in there about idea idea and how to create ideas but once you have these ideas how do you know which are the really good ones because if you're anything like me i have a million i ideas right a million ideas and i think they're all great when i first think of them i just get excited i'm like oh my god that's the best idea in the world but you know what like ninety nine percent they have a flaw ninety nine percent are actually ideas that will not work and most of them maybe not ninety nine percent but most of them are are actually terrible so they're not great ideas it's just in my head so how do you go in what is a process through which you go into the real world you test out an idea and also i go through this thing called the innovation loop where you go through a a process of discovery with each new idea so i liken in being an entrepreneur to being an explorer now an explorer your job is to find something really valuable but it's very dangerous you're gonna go into uncharted territory like the explorers that came through the americans you're gonna be hostile forces whether it it'd be nature that's gonna kill you natural thing whether it's gonna be other you know companies or tribes that are gonna come after you but you what you have to do is a figure you don't know what's there so when you first go there it's all this black wilderness and your job is to figure out your way through that wilderness as quickly as possible without getting killed you know so getting through that wilderness without getting killed is not an easy thing most startups die over ninety five percent from idea from conception all the way to you know being profitable or selling your company is ninety five percent do not make that so what are the pitch goes into detail on like the pitfalls along the way where startups go wrong what type of what is wrong thinking it goes into the fundamentals of business model like there certain business models that are really lucrative that like make a lot of money and there are others that are doomed to failure but on the surface you might not even recognize which is which i can give you an example so there are a lot of people out there who will put up these kickstarter projects mh and the kickstarter projects are pretty cool like they are like a super cool gadget that but what they don't realize is that that that gadget that they're are putting out there on kickstarter is there's some problems with it number one maybe the market is too niche right there's just not enough people out there who would buy it or that people think it's a nice to have it's something they would like to have but they don't really need and even if they get enough people to like give them their initials kickstarter target doesn't mean it's gonna be a successful product because the most successful products out there our products not that you sell wants to a person because as a small company when you sell to get a new customer let's say you make a gadget the profit margin isn't that high mh and you start off maybe with if it's really novel you start up with a reasonable profit margin but as soon as people in china and other countries start copying you that margin starts to shrink right it goes really really low because they didn't they'll just sell it for whatever they can get away with selling it for as low as possible and and if you have to acquire new customers which is the biggest job for any entrepreneur like do acquire new viewers for the your show or whatever is right acquiring new customers is expensive and if you don't have a big profit margin you can't afford to advertise you definitely can't afford to call them up and do direct sales right yeah like person the person and you can't afford even to market on google if the profit margin shrinks so that would just kill your business ultimately so you have to recognize that now the companies that really succeed well like microsoft google salesforce apple whatever they are they they don't sell a product once once you buy into them you are continually giving them money so whether it's on your iphone whether you're giving the money through the app store over and over and over you're locked into their ecosystem you're buying their upgraded phones you know over and over and over whether it's amazon which you know they they may take a commission off every sale whether they sell it or whether when their partner sells it they're you're giving them money every time you go back to amazon whether it's uber you know the reason that got the big valuation was because you know once you have the uber app you keep using it over and over and over so the recurring revenue when you can get recurring revenue that is the type of business model that really scales facebook has the same thing you're going on to facebook over and every time they're getting a few pennies from you you know but you view an ad but you're going over and over and over and over so the thing is you know i go into the detail on the book like how you can get a customer and never let that customer go never let that customer go and then how can you make that customer as valuable to you as possible over their lifetime i love it that's that's very that's very smart that's a very good takeaway and i think that you know it's it's funny i've always worked in in organizations that focus on recurring revenue my background was in telecom and now i'm in and now so obviously they're very profitable and and also now i'm in saas or or software right so it's always about recurring revenue but i think that a lot of industries haven't haven't woken up to that fact and now they're getting hit hard especially when if they're selling physical products or they have physical storefront fronts or brick and mortar and then like that's that's killing them if they haven't expanded and they haven't taken their their store online or expanded their products into the recurring revenue products you know like that's why people are really hurting now but that's what i think is gonna fuel i i i just tweeted this out yesterday i think this will be a benchmark in in the fourth industrial revolution and it will push people to look at digital in a new way and not just says that's that's my opinion at least i i don't i don't know if it's gonna change everyone's behavior but i already know it's changing some people because you know now it's like all the people that were told oh you can't work from home well now they're all working from home and they're probably working harder because they don't know when to shut off and you know so like now all the people that had all these work life balances didn't wanna commute an hour and a half now they're all working from home so now what does that do to the to to you know all these cultures these office cultures globally that didn't want it before like there's so many changes that are gonna happen because of this but also just tech and and you know modernization in general but it's very interesting thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one this

in this lessons episode uncover why lasting success depends on consistent effort rather than instant results discover how embracing small actions creates long term breakthroughs understand why focusing on progress instead of perfection builds resilience and explore how acting quickly on ideas turns opportunities into reality you you hear that spiritual message and in a lot of different religions where you're trying to reach that level of of consciousness and i do i do believe that that a lot of people don't take the first step into improving their lives just because there's this abundance of of of pessimism and negativity that really stop people from understanding what they can do and i think that what is tough for people to figure out wrap their mind around is to see the full path so they don't understand how the micro action they take is going to eventually lead to the success they want in in ten years and they just want the the immediate and that's it if it's not immediate it's not real or if it's not immediate it's it's not valid and that's wrong because i you know people that aren't entrepreneurs that don't go through this struggling and entrepreneurs know better than anything i don't mean to speak to entrepreneurs particular but if you ever ask an entrepreneur or anybody who's a success sports you know politics to anybody who has any sort of credibility in their in their field it's not overnight it's you know a thousands of all these different so it's like just take that same mentality apply it to any person and if you wanna be successful it's not gonna be the one thing it's gonna be the hundreds of thousands of things that you have to do anyway that's that as to my i i don't wanna take over the session this is all is all you just something i'd be passionate about it's very wise and people need reminded of that and that's also true in my case i've often told people yeah i'm an overnight success if you define overnight as thirty years yeah it is none of us that i am aware of had an overnight success everybody put in their time they put in their hours they put in their work and over time they had little crumbs of success that kept them going but the the vision is what kept them going and the belief in them selves and the possibility of the vision becoming reality is what kept them going and then at some point you break through and you you reach a level where people notice your success and to them it seems like it was overnight but you just appeared it's much like before the movie the secret in two thousand six i was pretty well known as an internet marketer as a copywriter because i was one of the first to go on the internet i was considered an internet pioneer and from that level of success a lot of people took notice at me a lot of people hired me but then the movie the secret comes out and that thing blows across the planet and suddenly everybody sees me and everybody recognizes me and i go on larry being live twice and does three specials on the show and news week and new york times and i'm being invited to speak all over the world suddenly overnight overnight joe is noticed yeah well all the the time before i was doing all the work to be in preparation for a phone call that i didn't even know was coming that would say hey we read one of your books which i wouldn't have written had i not taken the action to get it done and we wanna put you in this movie which i didn't know what was gotta do anything and then when i'm in the movie it ends up being this galactic historic making film yeah but all of this was because i was worked in thirty years to get to that point so your point is well taken and i think people need reminded of that if they open their business today they should not expect expect to sell out today if they write a book this week they should not expect it to be a best seller next week they should be doing the plugging along doing the action steps and trusting that yeah planting seeds in a little later you'll get the plug the fruit so so let's talk about let's talk about taking taking the first step i was i you know i was reading a little bit of of the the money love speed so that's like that's your latest book and i was i was thinking about you know how do i because obviously there's a whole bunch of things that i wanted to speak about in in your life and what you've done but it's sort of dovetail quite nicely into this how do you take that first action you know i think that that's primarily what the book is about but i'll let you sort of say it in your words because i wanna i wanna build out on that i think that's very valid for like right now because people for the first time are realizing jobs aren't secure they don't know what's going on all time high unemployment how do you take an action now what's the next step success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosts by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their back end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the op authority wherever you get your podcasts yeah that's a great question there's so many things i wanna say relevant to that question because i wanna kinda unpack it do it go forward go for alright well first of all you know we're in a pandemic right now and people are worried about the virus and i've made some videos for twitter and social media facebook and instagram where i said there's two viruses there's two viruses everybody's hearing about the first virus and everybody's nervous about the virus and everybody's going home and hiding because of the virus and rightly so we should pay attention to what the health authorities are telling us wash your hands do to social distancing stay at home do all of that stuff because you need to take care of your health so i'm not dismissing that but there's a second virus and the second virus is worse than the first the second virus is a virus of the mind the second virus is fear when people fall into fear because they're watching the news media which i say the solution has turned it off the mainstream news is just going to make you shutter in your shoes and they're great at programming you for fear and insecurity so i say turn it off and if you're really concerned about what's going on in the world go on a mainstream news diet listen to the headlines for five minutes see what you need to do turn the sucker off the other thing that's going on is when we fall into fear ironically we lower our immune system when we lower our immune system we make it easier for the first virus to come and visit us so what i've been advising people is we gotta a focus on the deposit jason mara has a new song right now called look for the good and boy do i love that message because i wrote i recorded a song called look for the light the same concept look for the good look for the light look for the positive it's always there it's the old mister rogers thing he says even in disasters look for the helpers there are people doing good things in fact i think the warriors of our times right now or the amazon delivery drivers and the food service people who are coming to our door bringing us gru to eat so we have new heroes out there but what i say is you gotta focus on the positive now this ties into what action do you take if you focused on the positive you can start to see with a little bit more clarity that there are opportunities here in fact you mentioned that there are millions of people who are unemployed in my mind i translate that to say there are millions of people who are about to become entrepreneurs i think that what's going on with this pandemic is almost a divine conspiracy it's almost like the divine which i some people would call that god you can call it the universe call it soar you can call it the higher power you can call it nature whatever you wanna call it that's bigger than all of us i think it's sent us to our room i think it's put us on notice i think what this divine conspiracy is is a conspiracy for good so let me explain that real quick because when people are told go inside and what they're looking at is go inside your room go inside your house i rein that in a meta physical way go inside means go inside yourself go inside this is our time to meditate to contemplate to reset to reconnect this is our time to be alone and we're being told stay away from others at least six feet away social distancing kind of a thing so it's almost like we've been put on a in an enforce spiritual retreat so okay so now we're inside we're meditating we're contemplating we're reflecting and maybe we get to see that well there's some opportunities here all those times as we said i wish i had time to fill in the blank you now have time to do it anybody who's ever said boy if i had time i'd read a book i boy if i had time i learn how to play the sa phone boy if i had time i'd learn a language go to youtube type in how to fill in the blank and there will be tutorials free for you to watch over the great gift that we didn't have a hundred years ago and we had the other pandemic the great gift being the internet facebook social media and what you're doing right here using and leveraging for good so all of this is the say it's our time to go within now as we go within we're start we're gonna get ideas and as we get ideas this is where action comes up the whole point of the title the title of the book is money loves speed it's one of the eight laws of money and money loves speed means that when you have an idea for a product or service you want to speed quickly rapidly act on it partly because when you have an idea it feels good and that feeling good is in energy is a an electricity that you can use to manifest your idea one of the reasons i've had eighty some books and in fact you listed this as my most recent book but while you were speaking i released another book the art inside some results and this is because i know money loves speak yeah so here we are acting on it and this is what i tell people to do and you have an idea you see an opportunity you need to act part of it is is just using the momentum of the energy that came with the idea another part of it is i believe the universe the cosmos whatever you wanna call collective unconscious is feeding ideas to us and their gifts and the sooner you act on an idea that comes as a gift the sooner you will profit from it in the marketplace i wanna say one more thing because i'm on a role with this and like i said i have a lot of things in say it's good one more thing when people consider action they often say well i don't know what to do or i don't know where to start and that's when they procrastinate well procrastination comes from overwhelm and what i tell people it's the old theodore roosevelt teddy roosevelt said do what you can with what you have right where you are that's it i tell people look where your shoes are or in on your feet what is the first baby step you can make right now the baby step i'm not asking you to complete a business plan or open the business or finish the book and right the end i'm saying what is the first step you can take right now there's always a first step an easy baby kindergarten simple first step that's the step you take and here's the profound great news you take that step the next baby step becomes apparent you take that step the next baby step becomes apparent steve jobs said you cannot connect the dots of your life looking forward you can connect them looking backwards but looking forward you sit here looking out into the future and you don't know what the dots are you don't know where the dots are gonna leave you can't explain it you can't create the map to it because it doesn't exist yet but if you look backwards you can tell the story like i can now of how i got here but the story of how i got here is so incredibly unpredictable that's i never would have been able to tell anybody how i got on the internet we didn't know what the internet was that didn't exist when i was in college and i or on them unemployed and broke yeah in the seventies same with the movie to secret i never would have guessed be in the movie because i didn't know that the movie was ever going to be made you cannot predict but you can look and see the baby step and that scott is where the first step is the baby step take that thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one in cog is a success story partner now have you ever wondered how all those scammers get your phone numbers all those tele marketers how you're always drowning and all these spam calls it's data brokers right now hundreds of companies are collecting and selling your personal information without your consent your address your phone number even your family members names to anyone is willing to pay and this puts you at risk of identity theft scams and harassment and that's where cog comes in they contact over two hundred and thirty data broker on your behalf and legally force them to delete your personal information no more spending hundreds of hours doing it yourself and cog handles all the paperwork follows up on objections and keep your data off the market with repeated removal i've actually been using en incognito myself it's scary and also incredible to see how much of my data was out there but they get rid of it they've got a thirty day money back guarantee so you can try at risk free use my code success adding cog dot com slash success to get an exclusive sixty percent off their annual plans you have to take back control of your privacy today success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in my miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me you there i don't care much for money i think money is overblown it doesn't have that much meaning to even though a house goes up you gotta pay taxes on it there were costs associated with it and these are costly things money's truly costly when you put money in the bank you don't realize just not your money it becomes to action money instantly he was once the wall street maverick the man who lived fast played hard and made millions ross man built a reputation as the bad boy of wall fearless bold and larger than life i turned fifteen hundred dollars into thirty million and i spent five to ten million along the way i was nuts but i was in my twenties i was young i just thought this is great mentorship me was huge throughout my time on wall street and make sure the difference in the world but behind the headlines of excess and controversy was a story of ambition downfall and redemption he tasted both the heights of success and the depths of console qui and now he's here to tell the truth unfiltered bra and unlike anything you've heard before the way i was able to climb the lattice so speak success my rap was listened can i just come in i won't say word i just wanna listen to you in order to get next to somebody that's meaningful substantial he knows what he can do for you the question is what can you do for me invest in yourself believe in yourself don't buy what everybody's selling don't buy the news most people are afraid of money the people that have it have it because they're not afraid of why are most people afraid of money the reason they're afraid of it is because they need to make an excuse why they don't have it or they don't chase it aggressively so you know it's become something that's relatively una and it things you know create fear over those kind of things yeah were you ever afraid of money never i never afraid of money but here's the funny thing about me i don't care much for money i think money is is overblown it doesn't have that much meaning to me you know i i the only person ever heard speak about this openly is robert k who i think is rich dad poor dad i think one of the smartest guys in the world and i i we have a lot of a very similar philosophies interesting enough our stores on lights speed on lights bees platform happened to be right next to charlotte actually real and got grant on the other side but this robert sa i think has a fundamentally he he's managed to put in words what i what i seem to know so like most of us will say you know i own my house right that's an asset and i i own my car i don't lease it that's an asset and you know nothing can be further from the truth these are not assets and if they are assets they they're characterized and d depreciation assets and even though a house goes up you gotta pay taxes on it you know there's there were costs associated with it it actually cost you money and unless you're getting interest because a financial interest meaning you rent it out let's say it's a property that you rent out now that's interesting he focuses on on the income statement of a balance sheet because he feels that certain things that it categorized assets really aren't and i actually get that so to me money has always been just a tool to acquire things that i find necessary comfort yeah things of that nature security these are things that i use money to acquire and these are costly things money's actually costly what do you mean by that let's just say you're in the podcast business yeah okay so you had to understand it happened to be just coincidence sense and he just we were talking about putting together a studio yeah right you might have spent fifty thousand dollars so you're you're actually it's your business and you you you spent let's say fifty a hundred twenty five thousand where the numbers are for the mixer and the camera and cast and it will all the the microphones etcetera the business itself until it generates income it's a bunch of expenses right of and you but you know we make a we're willing to invest in in a business because in theory the the business by definition is an entity that is formed to create a profit and so so when you look at things like so so to to have money people think the idea is to have money and to put it in a bank and save it i was talking to a guy yesterday he's got a few hundred grand saved and i said what do you do with the money he says i keep it in the bank i said really it's in the bank i said okay i said what do you think wine the bank because you know it's safety and you i get interest i quite interest you getting and he goes i think i'm getting like three point and eight percent or something like that i said a week a month now a year okay and who pays you that interest well will the bank pays be that interest well do you think the bank is losing money by paying you so do you know anything about banking so bank when you when what your real bank you know goes to the window and gets thirty three eight times whatever the money is and by the way when you put money in the bank you don't realize it's not your money money it becomes the bank's money instantly make money off of it too and do you get a shit you get a receipt like a c check and yes if you come back they have they you can honor it up until two hundred and fifty thousand because that's what the fdic says they immediately take your money leverage it up they borrow against your money and get thirty three times that money so it's ten grand now that it's turned it to three hundred a thirty grand and they invest that money and i promise you banks make more three and a half percent a year on your money i said if you considered looking at a a very conservative blue chip dividend paying stock this is what do you mean i said well i put money sometimes in the market that shouldn't be a surprise okay i said save money i said do you have it by walmart you heard a walmart biggest retailer the twice okay you think there's any chance they're gonna have any problems paying paying you out because every ninety days that you hold their stock they're paying you a dividend do you know that walmart much dividend is equivalent to five percent a year plus the stock continuously so you get the on the appreciation plus the dividend payout right so like buying us owning a stock and sitting with it that doesn't pay you a dividend is like owning a piece of real estate you have no tenants in it you know which it's it's uno occupied and that was that the way you no but it's it but you know it's funny because you're you're saying yeah owning a stock doesn't pay you dividends is a dumb idea which i agree but at the same time the majority of people have such have such insignificant understanding of money and finance that they're gonna leave money in the bank they know what we teach you what we sell you yeah buy and hold yeah buy a stock and hold it for thirty or forty years so the the when you buy people don't even understand this you know every bank stock broke professional trades in the short side what does that mean you're gonna call up your broke later scott and you said i wanna buy thousand chance of nvidia let's just say for argument takes a hundred it's really about a hundred and thirteen so it's a hundred thousand dollars right and you say okay and you called me broke i wanna buy a thousand she has he calls you back in a minute later and it says you bought a thousand shares at at a hundred that's hundred thousand right and you feel good you feel like the the brokerage firm just went not in bought you that stock but they did not buy you that stock that's what we want you to think they looked at the market and they shorted it to you they borrowed it from stock loan department somewhere and they sold it to you why because they can always buy it back cheaper so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna sell to you for a hundred only because i know that i can probably buy buy it back at ninety nine ninety eight ninety seven whatever the numbers are but cheaper because they're closer to the market than you so things are we you think you see something and nobody nobody knows what they're doing it's not we're sitting on a chair that i would swear i'm sitting on a solid item but if we look under an electron microscope it's billions of subatomic particles moving it you know to a hundred eighty six thousand miles a second and and in speed it's moving it's active so you know be you know your understanding of the world isn't always as factual you might believe so with money especially and things like investing you've been programmed to believe what we've been telling you to i'm part of that machine that went ahead and pitched and sold the story just like you know hundreds of thousands of other people and and and hundreds of thousands of books etcetera you know we're talking about we just briefly touched on investing in stocks and dividends people's financial education is so far from yours it's unbelievable it's almost like it's almost funny if it wasn't sad how far people's financial education is because there's a lot of different reasons it could be our school system doesn't teach us shit it could be that our parents never taught us anything they didn't know any better they didn't know themselves how many people retire and they go trust an investment adviser from a bank and that's their one retirement strategy right in the us are four zero one k's in the in canada our r isps or you got a whole bunch of different things right correct but you've been in this game for a long time not everybody has been in this game since what the early eighties nineteen eighty three you were making you were making money you making good so i have you're making two hundred thousand dollars a month of the stock broker in your twenties is that correct yeah correct that's not bad that's not bad it was very good actually and it was i i felt i felt you know wolf thomas wolf wrote a book yeah called bon fire the van best number one best myself that made movies out of it one movie series of shows all the whole thing and they talk about guys that were wall street at that time in the eighties and they called them masters of the universe and i was one of those guys and in the nineties they talked about the bad boys of wall street in the eighties prior to the eighty seven crash yeah because starting in nineteen eighty two the market went straight up imagine a gray a shot yeah so you get in here by my elbow and it went just like straight up for five years i turned fifteen hundred dollars into thirty million and i spent five at ten million along the way i was nuts but i was in my twenties i was young and i just thought this is great like i didn't even understand that could ever end or even changed because i was you know i was i was hooked in with some of the most famous guys in the history of wall street now today are on the forbes billionaire list etcetera guys have created nasdaq they created electronic trading they created the ideas of the fundamental way markets are made today the way you understand venture capital private equity all these different things so again mentorship for me was huge throughout my my my time on on wall street and makes sold the difference in the world i had guys that taught me that showed me that allowed me to listen in took the time out to structure deals invited me in deals once they saw i had value when i i was talented and i could add value you know people i'm gonna give this is a little tidbit for your listeners because i know you have a substantial audience i'm getting a lot of people right now because i'm to come up in the sort of influence of podcasting space right i saw it's online education the wealth formula podcast i'm meant through a lot of people and people are coming to me out of the wood work right now and everybody's like they see now that i i'm out of prison short period of time and i'm on the come up my shots going like this now and people are saying you know i know you've signed to produce a movie my brother wrote a script a screen play a book can i please send it to you another guy wrote a book and he see that i'm about to get a a big publishing deal and he wants to send me the book so i could maybe get him a publishing deal i have literally two three dozen people and i'm sure you had do two reaching it out telling me what i could do for them yeah and the way i was able to to climb the lattice so speak success my my rap was listen can i just come in i won't say word i just wanna listen to you there's nothing i won't do for you what can i do for you in order to get next to somebody that's meaningful substantial somebody that is on that trajectory he knows what he can do for you i know what i can do for you i know what i can do for him the question is what can you do from me so you wanna get near next to a big guy you wanna pick his brain you wanna see how he moves how we operates operate how we handles things what can you do for the person that says to me i wanna handle all your social media nelson i got this you don't worry about it i'll take care of this now that's somebody that has value to me and if i look you up and down and i say you offer for value to me and i think i'm and if i'm willing to accept that value a real guy a real dude in life won't even accept value unless he knows he's gonna pay it back he's gonna offer it back i know what i could do for a young man i really know i know what i could do for a middle age man or your guy's my age the question is why would i what i'm not a charity i do do a lot of charitable work i'm a philanthropist i know what you're saying no when you started you just gave everything that you had to these guys that were the mentors and the people that were you know tenured in the game how can i serve you yeah what can i do feel you when i when i speak to anybody that has in my opinion real value and i wanna get with him in some way if i wanna get him to do something for me i don't say can you do something for me i say how can i serve you i want you to know there's a willingness to give those are the people that end up getting people that are willing to serve i i know a lot of people that have made a lot of money and i've been a little bit successful not compared to some people have had you know nine figure exits and whatnot but for me it's like a different kind of success because you have a little bit of fame and you have an audience so people are interested in you for that reason as well but whether or not it's money or fame that you bring to the table obviously very privileged to have that but it's hard to it's hard to figure out whose intentions are true when you're trying to figure out who to work with who to spend time with it's very difficult you are on your way i mean a lot of say oh a podcast another podcast it's like such a crowded space we've done we've we've analyzed this space there's may be a thousand people doing serious people how many doctors how many lawyers how many stock programs how many engineers how many plumbers how many electrician there's nobody podcasting d mini on a pin head nothing unregulated business you can have your own network virtually no barrier to entry if you have wifi and you have a phone with a camera you can be a podcast one of the things that really swayed me a lot of people are saying you meant for this kind of thing your podcast you were speak you can help so many people etcetera and i said what do i know from this kind of thing and then my ex wife sat me down it showed me is woman she was like a sales clerk checkout person at at walmart or one of the big big box stores and she has a iphone and she sits at a kitchen table and she started a podcast and now she's making seventy thousand a month and she didn't even believe that it could work like that and she stayed as a like a cashier at one of these big box stores until she's making fifty thousand a month on a continuing basis she makes annual salary monthly she that's what she says ed you know she just at some point you know it hit a why are you killing yourself you know getting up early in the morning going over work eight ten hours and then you have kids and her husband and then when you squeeze in your podcast and me meanwhile this is what's pain paying everybody's bills and all that kind of thing because it was almost like she couldn't believe it and i believe this is where we're at in this particular business you have a great name you're smart young you're good looking you married well i mean you know you're on solid footing the world is yours bro you think about you think about opportunity right i mean there was opportunity with leverage and money and finance when you started out there's still that opportunity too but now i think that the opportunity is with media and reach because then you you can combine these things right you've there's there's this concept from a guy naval ra con he's a modern day philosopher for a very successful entrepreneur he built one of the company he built angel list which is a big like a startup company you can invest through it but the point is he speaks about four kinds of leverage there's like technology there's finance there's people and then there's media as like the four things that if you figure out how to tap into those things like this sky's a limit right you're goal gold now what you what you know is you know financial and you know people you know how to use those two types of leverage and technology to a degree because you've like also built a massive audience yourself but media is something that people are there there's a lot of creators out there but i don't think people understand how powerful media is i don't think there's really been a play where somebody has understood the power of media plus public market i see a lot of technology plus public markets for sure right people taking companies public all the time that are software companies they ipo their unicorns or you know trillion dollar companies now i forget a billion three trillion anything but media i don't see that people have figured that alignment out yet you know there was a guy named some the reds stone who figured that out and he formed via come and he had a and b shares and chow reds is daughter and that runs via bay and she's in the midst of they're in the midst of a lot of there's a lot of noise going on regarding that company in paramount and they're gonna spin it off it's yeah so that's that's incorrect so there are news media i think i meant not traditional media meant new media well there is really been no play yet with the new media and that's why former media because my plan is to introduce the world of new media to the world of wall street and stock market morality and i mean there were guys like patrick bet david that i think understand it yeah and moving that way my guess is at some point value payment we'll we'll go public that's my guess i don't know that he would be interested just in selling but you never know because he might command a price of three four five six billion you know who understood this and really there was a guy named mark cuban yeah yeah of course and big the end of in the nineties he created a broadcast media it was a company that at its height did twenty five million in revenues in the media space he sold that for five point nine billion dollars ninety percent of all employees became millionaires but when you are talking about a new innovative technology media which offers its own morality and the morality of the stock market has witnessed by anything with dot com was being valued at you know a billion dollars what i'm trying to give you is a morality the morality aspect of money the stock market you think if yahoo would orphan mark cuban in a billion dollars he wouldn't have taken it he would've have said no that would've have said c to mark and an hour lady would have been like you know i was just thinking about it can we do a billion two because i really eyes on on a basketball team in dallas and they want to him my imagine that was twenty hundred a million for the dallas mavericks and and he sold them in a value of six five to six billion so he's pretty good at understanding morality and value so raw media it is it is our intention as a group to roll up podcast people in the space mentors etcetera things that encompass what i call the social media the new media the influences space and we're gonna bring that to the market what's that gonna be worth well let me let me ask you a question if we can control twenty million eyeballs what's that worth a lot well let me just tell you something if there's a game or an event they gets twenty million eyeballs on a on television let's just say or a movie do you want to understand the value it's enormous it's it's it's enormous the super bowl was a single biggest event in the world and they get about a hundred million eyeballs worldwide so what happens do you get twenty million think about that twenty million on command and command that's yeah you you listen good see you understand the value nobody knows what what what the value really is it hasn't been done after it's been done tried and tested a few times then we'll have a better idea but the idea is to be avant khan to introduce the whole thing because that i got that idea you know because guys like mister beast we're complaining that he's making money a lot of money he he's had offers though for over a billion correct now but i'm talking about believe it or not only about about ten months ago did he you know he's just not making that wall street money it's not making that wall street money you got companies that are sorry ass companies the average ipo for a big firm is valued at a billion dollars i don't think people really can comprehend how much money is in wall street i don't think they've ever lived it they understand three trillion dollars a day trades a day i'm walter i don't think i was in prison and one of the big questions when you first get the prison guy see on the yard to see walking around the compound a a new guy a o g a o man he's told me rock solid because that was the name of a book i wrote and i had like you know don't ask like a hundred fifty books sent in and they were gone in ten minutes i was shocked to find the thieves in prison you know what i mean and so they would say so what what institutions you with what institutions you've been at and i'm like new york stock exchange london stock exchange and they're talking about like what prisons if you've been at course yeah like you say of i had no idea you know i got for the second you said that i'm like are they talking about prisons they're laughing at me because i'm like literally saying to your york stock exchange you remember the bulk on hotel in beach club and i'm trying to think of where i'm a member like you know f club and then they say you know they talk they brag you know i was the man in he i had you know eighteenth and and vine i was my block bro i mean we were doing we were doing two two keys a week bro two keys a week then another guy be like yeah well i'm a i'm from dc man write two bucks in the white house avenue g in eighth street you know we would turn it three keys a week and this would go around like a whole thing you know and they'd say i'd be like you guys are punk ass bitches wall street pro we do three trillion dollars a day indeed as a success story partner now say you just realized your business needed to hire someone fast how can you find amazing candidate fast it's easy just use indeed when it comes to hiring need is all you need stop struggling to get your job posting seen on other job sites indeed sponsored jobs helps you stand out and hire fast and with sponsor jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed 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terms of like drugs and just probably just going very hard and all aspects of life i working hot playing on yeah but just briefly you don't have to go through everything but briefly talk about sort of like what you were able to accomplish before the government came after you for a hundred and forty million and also why with the moves that you made over your career did they choose to come after you early in my career largely due to the drugs and alcohol being young stupid and not having a good idea not not not understanding how i was supposed to really conduct myself or handle myself i got advice my father passed away i one of sixteen and i lacked a north star a moral compass a a figure that would you know say hey tighten up get in here you know my father was one of the most honest decent hardworking working man i've ever he was the most i had ever encountered my life and i was very angry when he passed i i was medic myself with i'm a garbage shed you know drugs alcohol but the cocaine really is what brought me to my knees ultimately and i started out at a what the cola a wire house a merrill lynch ef hut smith barney payne weber they're big recognizable names and we basically like a supermarket with sc ford we could sell your car insurance life insurance health insurance i could build your stock portfolio to your ira your ke plan if you have a business on an operated business i was a bond salesman like did tea bills and mu and corporates and you know you know everything you could think of if if you said to me this is what i wanna do i'd say you know what i'm an expert in that field but i was at a firm that trained me and license me in all these areas and i was very frustrated after a year because i had opened three hundred plus accounts which is like some sort of like that a record when i tell the story people like oh my god like guys in the business twenty five years and never never that what's dollar value when you do something like that like how much money you bring the firm well what happens is the firm just wants customers i brought in three hundred and thirty customers colds from scratch with no help no leads you know no nothing special no cost to the firm and i generate like three hundred and twenty five three hundred thirty thousand my first year and the firm gets i can't even tell you how much they make the you here's the funny thing so you know i didn't understand then how much the firm is making on me or anything you just know like for every dollar you in commission the firm is keeping half you're getting half something like that but what happens is every time you buy or sell something at a bank or firm they're making money in ways you don't have any you don't you haven't even thought about this this is a business this is a business about money they curate every transaction affects maybe or kicks off is a catalyst for another five transaction you don't even know about they short they short you the stock they short you the unit trust then they have to go ahead and trade and get so now they have some power they have now know what paying customers willing to pay for a certain amount of shares of stock or units of a trust or membership interest in llc etcetera it gets very technical but you know it's broken down fifteen ways by tuesday that very smart guys have been analyzing for a hundred years let's see how they can use that to their advantage and they have figured it out so i i was ranked number one out of a class of like out of a hundred fifty guys starting out in nineteen eighty four eddie have hud which was the number one and number two a training platform ever and to this day everybody's wow you and he fucking guy thought it was the best training program and that's why i picked it because i it had that reputation so i became a very hot prospect instantly so i'm like a ball player in my first year i'm make i'm score twenty points a game i'm a lockdown defender i'm getting rebound of getting assist i'm a team play i don't cause any trouble for anybody now the meantime i'm doing what i'm doing i'm drinking and i'm smoking i'm sn every day but i'm young and i could do it but you know what everybody's doing that's what i'm thinking everybody's doing it and i found my crowd of people that would doing it there's there are people at every single firm partying like that just a fact and the funny thing is slash forward when i did get clean nobody went to hire me when was clean you're an aa what does that mean aa you don't drink you don't drink during the day you don't drink during the way i don't understand i mean what he what do he be friday night i'm having people over you know my daughter's of you know she's being bought mit food and she's getting christ and we're gonna be serving wine you're not gonna have a drink i'm like no i'm like you would think that would make me more attractive to serious people they wanted big balls ross man that who's buying drinks for everybody at the bar and who's hungover over smoking cigarettes going through a pack two a day at my desk back in those days you could smoke everybody had big ass trays everybody had flask and bottles you know in that desk and drinking funny on time seeing wild it's amazing how the media was able to influence so many people like smoking is the devil today people that smoke today tell me i'm like the devil i they have a little box in manhattan outside they go on the curb you know it's ten feet from the answer so it's a little thing like a penalty box exactly and they sit there and they smoke suck down their cigarettes they you know they i feel like a an idiot but don't drink as much anymore either they don't i found it i just heard an interesting stat one of my friends works with cruise lines and he says that the drinking down significantly on the cruise lines you know what happens in the drinks because that people are so funny is the total slide but i thought it was an interesting point so they expect that when people drink less they'd spend less money at the casino and he says that's not the case because when people now know that if they drink they're expecting to get fucked at the casino so they go to the casino thinking i'm sober i'm gonna win and they get fucked three x exactly right yes so now drinking down on cruises and casino revenues like three or four x what it was before covid is that crazy people are so funny and they always try and beat the system but the system always beats them regardless but anyways funny i friends who play poker and they purposely don't they drink they like to drink them but when they go play poker they won't drink yeah but you know the average gambler thinks if they're sober they're gonna beat the house and they never win the odds of the odds the odds are the odds you man anyway exactly back to you so this is the this is a different time than what a lot of people live in right now obviously not people aren't smoking at their desk people aren't drinking awesome some i'm sure people still i'm sure people in find still drink and do a whole bunch of blow like i'm pretty sure this is not change that much all happening right now but by the way if you're in finance you have a guy that has a problem call me i do i do consulting for some fortune five hundred companies and if you have an executive that you wanna protect don't know how to handle him he's very valuable to the organization but you know he might have suffer from the disease of addiction or optimism we can help you ross man reach out info at russ man dot com will help you when you were going through the more stressful parts of your story you never went back and and felt that you had to like go rely on substances or anything like that to get through it i actually wanted to swallow a bullet if that's i don't know if you get to that substance you know many times and i see there's a lot you know i i prayed to god don't i don't wanna wake up tomorrow i don't wanna face tomorrow i've found guilty four counts i'm going in with my family to be sentenced by the judge the lawyers tell me fifty percent fifty fifty they're gonna take remind you gonna take you into a custody write then in there so put all your valuables in a plastic bag and be prepared to hand it to your your wife or your lawyer because they're it'll take you right in and whatever you have on you probably end up missing and you know i just wanna roll i always the you know expensive things and i i just don't wanna you know god i just don't wanna wake up tomorrow that you know i've had pressure that's been that big where drinking or taking a pill wouldn't do anything you know know i'm facing real stress know a lot we have a lot of manufactured stress a lot of that's part of the disease of addiction in your mind whatever the stress is in real life whatever is going on in your mind it makes it it there's a morality effect magnified times a thousand and now if i felt like any of that would have helped me i would've have i would've have picked up tell me the rest of the story about what made them want to come after you i'll i will explain it to so by the time i got clean nineteen ninety yeah i had racked up about nine custom arbitration these are not these are civil all civil yeah and i'll give you an example we do million dollar deals on the phone you're asking somebody to invest i say scott look you have an you have an account with me say scott look i got a very good feeling about steel us steel symbol x member the doubt thirty i call icons buying stock i got a very good feeling it's something i want you to own and you say i russ it's a real company i know steel let's let's i want you to ten thousand shares thirty it's thirty bucks a share can you get me three hundred grand in the next week but i'm buying if you say yes i'm buying to write there ten thousand shares you say you know what let's do it i said thank you i'll call you back or have my girl call you back with an execution buy get a ten thousand shares it's three hundred grand you know i just made like a six nine thousand dollar commission my assistant calls you up it's the trades confirmed okay two three weeks go by stock goes down three points it's now twenty seven now you have had to confirmed by my assistant you told me let's do it you got a confirmation in the mail and very well might have got a monthly statement in between you call me up and said bro what's going on i thought you really you know i thought you really knew something i get a good feeling i said i do okay it didn't happen as quickly oftentimes there were delays sometimes my information is so fresh it takes a minute for it to sift through the market but i just want you know you know be patient it's a great company when we we're gonna come out of this more than all you're gonna be very happy with me you say you know i don't really remember authorizing this trade what what do you mean you know i i i was excited because you was so passionate but i really wanted to think about it i'm like you put three hundred thousand in the account the the trade was confirmed you say yeah ross don't don't be like that i wasn't sure and i say listen so now whatever i was doing the night before is wet one off i'm thinking about meeting my coke guy you know later tonight i'm all edgy and here you are fucking lit with me and i'm like sky fuck yourself you said i don't want to stock i said you want me to sell it to stock yeah i'm there's a thirty thousand dollar if you sell it right i had strongly advise you not to do that i never authorize that trade so now i'm doing literally sometimes a hundred trades a day dozens of trades with dozens of different guys and there were times these kind of things happen these kind of disagreements but amongst two gentlemen in the heated of battle things can be said things can be discussed things can be worked out the odds just going to a legal issue down the road is very rare cost more than thirty grand the whole thing no too and it's gonna be a nightmare a few of the whole thing and but i'm very abrasive edgy i'm hungover man i i need some more some more drugs in me or a drink you need the stock is down three points and didn't expect that and i own it to and everybody owns it i'm getting a lot of calls like this and i'm like you know and and now all of sudden it went from them i'm not sure if i authorize it to it's son i didn't authorize this trade i want my money back and i'm like you know what scott go fuck yourself this is bullshit you know what and i know you go i'm gonna sue your ass i'm gonna complain and i'm like you know what i'll see and fucking i'll see an arbitration in six years go fuck yourself and i'd hang up the phone instead of trying it but you know you just wanted your handheld you want to be caught old you want you understand it's things happen in business all the time right but i wasn't having it i was very edgy the markets did go up and down like crazy and i just i just was into one guy actually we went to arbitration we show up my lawyer he's there with his lawyer the panel say this whole thing he was i told you i see you in six years and he quoted me and it became a topic in this arbitration and but other than when the government no this is this is just this this is an example so they they say like this they never closed the file when you're in this kind of it's a regulated industry it's heavily regulated for them to say i was doing something always ridiculous because they said before they became at criminal they had nine different examiners and different regulators come including the sec yeah who cleared me on every audit we never had a problem we never had an issue we were completely mindful and and in in in good order and all that kind of stuff there was a our documents were they they i i i spent the most money on legal fees and because by the time i had my own firm and i was in business for myself at the time the government got interested in me i already had these issues i was dealing with eventually everything was settled i settled every arbitration dealt with everything one most lost a couple everybody was paid everybody was whole and then the stock exchange came at me and i made a blanket settlement with them for all the activity that happened pre nineteen ninety while i was still using because they knew my story very well and they said mister man was in new york stock exchange we offered the money this is they said we know you have a lot of money and we know you were great honor we follow crib very closely well i'm a remember these exchange they were unregulated they said we don't want your money we want you to take six weeks off and go to the beach and think about how fortunate you are to still be in this business so i was suspended by the new york stock exchange no fine glad the money but they i went to puerto rico with my girlfriend for month and just so you guys all know i made more money trading the market during that six weeks at any other time and my life because i was so determined to make money i was so don't fuck you and you know i'll show you i'm like that kind of guy tell me i'm like dana white tell me i can't go ahead tell me i can't i love that shit i live for that like that's giving me extra motivation i know so now by the time the nineties come along i'm so i'm killing it and life is easy business easy easy you're back with ny i'm i'm fully year i'm fully good and i'm at a firm i'm waiting for my firm to be approved but i'm working at a firm that my firm i was that one out of business and they were required by a big firm and the big firm ph a lot of people but they paid me not only did they keep me they gave me a hundred fifty thousand dollars to stay i was okay with that you know i'm on my own firm they i don't know this i take the money and i'm doing business they call me in one day is the president of the firm the owner of the firm big shot his partner is regarding paul fitzgerald who's the former president of the new york stock exchange a chairman right before this guy dick ras who was very well known because of nine he was at chairman during nine eleven this guy before that in the nineties and they had a deal and they were offering from me tens of millions of dollars to do this deal and that's why they gave me a hundred fifty ran up front because they knew know i was the only one capable of doing this deal and it was a very sexy little company out of new jersey they had some sort of cure treatment for a disease and it looked really gray on paper it was already public it had a following you know stockholders holds these different things great ir when you look at the company it looks great and they say we want you to take start buying and take a position with your clients had hundreds and hundreds of clients i'm representing you know by several hundred million dollars at this time and my my client money plus my own money etcetera they said we we want me to they want me to take over this particular company so typically when you're public company you have investment banks that you pay to keep pumping out research on your company keeping the shareholders up to date etcetera if you're not a giant like a mcdonald's or a microsoft you you know there's a game you play this protocol is a ways to do things you don't have to reinvent the wheel companies go public you hire a couple of investment banks you pay if there's a big stock issue you know there's a guy that can step in and maybe clean up the stock meaning some of the guys bought the stock for a dollar and now it's five thousand i wanna sell half a million shares of stock there's really no bias for that kind of size but they find a guy to position the stock because he believes in the story etcetera and they want them to be that guy for this company and they were willing to give me ten million dollars cash on top of anything thinking can earn and this is from a guy that was the president of new york stock exchange and to see y'all this big big brokerage company and i'm like what's the catch i'm thinking this is like i'll take it was just real money i'm gonna had money but this is real money to do a deal that i you know that sounded great and look great and everything else right yeah of course but it was a scam they had all their partners and friends and their own money in and whatever this technology was it turns out it was a bust and you were gonna be this guy they wanted me to be the guy yeah that took all of their friends out their partners their best customers them my guys would come in and buy millions of shares i would be promoting and by the way when i started buying so i was the kind guy at wall street at some point at this time if i decided to buy something and take a big position it was like thirty forty guys around wall street that followed my week thought i have very good sense of value that and they would jump in so at my trial years later they said that i was a cult leader on wall street and that if ross mandela decided to raise his staff yeah the stock would go up three dollars it's power and it's that's true but not because i fuck people i bought scams that i knew a bad and got every i bad to everybody so i get a pay down to the table and that's ultimately the crime that my a couple of brokers that my firm got involved in and that's what put defendant into my firm and that's where they try to pin on me later but i turned down this deal and then they threatened me they said if you don't do this deal now i was they showed me like what's wrong with this discovery but they showed you all as wrong paid admitted it to me they said listen we wanna be up front it's not gonna be a great ending but you'll have ten million cash plus you probably make another five to ten million during in a you know buying all the stock and doing all these things and i said no i didn't get sober i live by those principles to this day to cheat people to lie to people to rock it for money i make money i earn money i don't need to beg people in a bad stock deal i buy real stocks and i get paid for it and i i have good information i get great information folks to this minute and they said well the wall street journal been calling us and they wanna do a story a big story on rogue broke and your name came up you're very famous in the business but we can protect you so they were threatening they're were blocking door me sorting you what did i do i said fellas thanks but no thanks he'll fuck yourself and i left and they made my life miserable but they didn't know i would already applied to have my own firm i'd had already done all the work i'd had already raised millions of dollars always different things and so we got i get a call by the this guy jeffrey taylor wall street journal was the first time i really make this paper he's writing a front page story he wrote the biggest story march fourteenth nineteen ninety six it came out this all started at nineteen ninety five i managed to stall the journal and this this right it was a hit piece unjust you well explain to you yeah used me they wrote my entire life story to incite the regulatory system of wall street and they used me my whole life story five thousand two hundred fifty words they literally went to my hometown and knocked on doors they went to my high school interviewed my teachers they interviewed customers that i had issues with you know some of these tours i told you earlier and front page wall street journal and they used my story like how could this guy still be in the business he said nine arbitration he was admitted drug deal he was doing cocaine he admits that he was abrasive this and that and i submitted myself to three eight hour interviews with this writer sharing my life story because my lawyer said you're you're you're gonna be approved for this firm in the next couple of months but if this guy puts this story out they're gonna deny you you'll never on a firm so i said what should i do said the best thing to do is stall i said how do i stole i said nobody can talk like you ross he's gonna sit down and you start telling him your life story and by the end of the day you'll be up to like high school don't have to first in college and you you're so interested they're gonna wanna come back and get more they think they're getting more information on you what you're doing your storing and then when all the lawyers because the wall street journal at three lawyers i had three lawyers we all they're scheduling you all they get on their little black at the time what we could kick it will stall them a few more months so so in the so he writes three grueling after three grueling eight hour interviews and i even sent to the guy said look i don't know why you using me for this i could be a great source for you as a a reporter if you don't skew me with this story i could be a valuable story i'm on the inside of so i'm a big i'm a big guy in the scam i'm i'm on the come up that's my graph yeah right i'm like scott cla freaking getting podcast career i'm on that i'm going and he wrote that i tried to i offered him that deal in the front page will journal i tried to like bribe him you know what i mean and so eventually the story comes out march fourteenth nineteen ninety six i'm on the front page of this his newspaper i'm the headline on the news i was living in a i i under an apartment of manhattan in a very fancy building and when i walked downstairs we had a big desk you know like like i imagine a very fancy kind of hotel but it's a coop op a big apartment and you know the guy had the everyone had the papers everyone in the building at wall street journal they always ask asked me that if i would to autograph it the girl that was working for me the stunning young sales assistant that was working for me this gorgeous deployed blonde built like nobody's business i was working for me you know she actually slept with me that week because i was now like a big celebrity and of course i married her stephanie i just wanna say and forget and and and i was like like like what's the name of that management g g jill wanted to make me a cove story the bad boy of wall street and i should've have done it because i would have a forever but my lawyers took me out of all that because by now i've been approved already and i haven't owned my own firm and when that story came out freaking five hundred guys came to the mice my so in the movie the wolf of wall street yeah jo be talks about how he was in forbes and they called him the wolf wall street that's an entirely fabricated story he used my story for that scene this he was never called the wolf wall street he he made that name up all by himself he was not enforced into a story on him that's my honest to true story you don't believe march fourteenth nineteen ninety six and the title of story it was you know they they used my high school year court lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip has been that was my high school quote i was only seventeen and already i felt like what a long strange trip it's been i was seventeen years old that's my high school quote year quote and they had my year book picture and they wrote this entire five thousand two hundred fifty one story the biggest story in the history of the dow jones corporation that owned the wall street journal at that time was a number one selling paper in the whole world on planet earth and i it was the biggest story at that time ever written on somebody but all of a sudden every regulator in this business and in government put my picture up the sec called later that day and said mister that we'd be we just wanna call you and we just opened up an investigation of you i'm like why they said son you're the front page of the wall street journal and it's not a good look because in that business any any press considered bad press and i fought like hell not to be in this paper that's what began my journey as sort of becoming a household name in that industry and when something like that happens they have to investigate of course they do they have to invest okay it's not even a choice at that no they talked the guy the guy was a lovely guy they called me i never spoke to the again until they charged me and they charged me it's the same thing that you would charged me with in nineteen ninety six so did the sec lead to the fbi what well that's the mis no so you know because the sec had done an investigation and found i everything we did every tea was crossed in everything because of that story i was the most analyzed registered representative in the history of the industry so when you open up a brokerage firm if you and nelson were brokers he started your own firm you know they got the finra would say for every fifteen brokers y'all you have to have a compliance officer compliance guy gets like a hundred eighty grand a year yeah okay for every fifteen brokers you have to have one i had to have one for every four bro because yours because i'm ross man up yeah and i did and we were squeaky fucking clean because by the time i i was already a wealthy guy i'm you know and and you know i was being audited five times more normally with anybody else but even after that story and then there was several other stories written it bought me as a result but then what happened was i had my own firm and i started doing really great business and i got some great deals and at some point the wall street journal we i was doing a deal and we wanted to call one am my partners is i'm gonna call the journal because i wanted to see what they think about ross man otherwise we don't wanna have put out a story and he it was wow there now the wall street journal was ross man del neutral so the next time i was on the cover of the wall street journal was a good story and i went into the homeland security business right after nine eleven and i was i was funding companies that were helping the american public deal with national security tom h who was now the bo of the united states and trump's cabinet he's on tv like every two days thomas h he was the number two man at the new organization called the department of homeland security people in don't realize that's only been around since two thousand two and was formed as a result of the failures of nine eleven lad nine eleven to happen they made the biggest agency in the history of this country called the department if i went security and tom h was the number two guy and he came to work for me he served on my boards because i was in the home security business and the government had very positive viewing me at this point so that so everything was good how that hon dory killing everything was good i'm killing it and then i take my brokerage from i go to london and i get public in london big that hadn't been a deal and i decided the atlantic since nine eleven ships station is a success story partner do you know what separates 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success story hubspot is a success story partner now the future of business is happening right now and you don't wanna miss it that's why you have to be at inbound twenty twenty five they are bringing together the brightest minds in marketing sales business entrepreneurship ai for three incredible days in san francisco the global epi epicenter of innovation and technological disruption picture this you are learning directly from amy poe about creative leadership you're getting ai insights from da modi who's literally shaping the future of artificial intelligence here's what makes inbound special it's not just the great keynote you're gonna dive into breakout sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup up ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with all these great entrepreneurs decision makers industry leaders peers who are actively shaping the future of business from september third to fifth at the mo center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it visit it inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today so explain to people what you're actually doing at this point like what because it yes i i understand it but for the average person i don't to understand the difference between a company going public on the new york stock exchange or the ts x or the london exchange i don't even know what that one's called but explain what you did when you moved to london why you moved to london okay so what happened that i was kinda like the first thing that got i started to get this whole fucking fbi thing but what happened was this i the company that i formed the ninety five during this whole fiasco that story being written yeah that i was stalling i got approved it was called rome capital r way n i guy named jerry roth jerry i hope you're okay bedford new york he's rich guy who's was a traitor at be kellogg goldman sachs wood b each kellogg became a very very wealthy guy i bought the stock brokerage from from him i called it rowan capital he's a horse at grown colored horses where his favorite color that's where the name comes from there's always a lot of people trying to think what's r o a and ro is for ross let's see who's the a n who's the secret partner it was a color of a horse he was a horse collective was this whole thing crazy people are so crazy and i i would i bought that company in ninety five i got approved to own it that's what i was waiting for that approval and run it and within twenty months less than two years i sold it it was the hottest brokerage firm new york city blacks stone everybody knows who blacks stone is blacks stone is sitting in my space in the office that i had decorated by a very famous interior decor in new york name ken walker and probably the third biggest private firm in the world right now they took my spade that's the space that i decorated and designed and so i retired i built this firm i made a bottom money and exit and but i had it when i sold the company my personal clients didn't wanna go with these guys that were buying the company and i had a huge business twelve guys working for me my own book so mike nelson came to me at the time and said listen you're done i get it we not you made a i money i make sure everybody i get pay but i really and i had met my my my future wife at this place so i was involved in a in a in like in a hollywood type of fantasy romance and courtship and were traveling and just doing all kinds of great things together and settling down plenty a family and the guys that worked for me said listen i parked them i make sure they're were okay they didn't wanna work at the the people had put the firm there was a little a couple of guys i knew very well i call friends were working at a owned a small investment might called thorn water which was a limited partnership ll and it was right across the street who was in a browns stone they owned the browns stone in new york which probably today worth you know a hundred fifty million was right across the street for my apartment where i was living so i parked my twelve guys in that space i let them continue with the business you know the brokerage but we our brokerage business just our client business was generating you know probably half a million a month and i was the biggest beneficiary of that and that was just like you know like i let the guys have most of it and at some point they said they came to me said listen you're so good at this you put together affirm the wall street journal everybody's hunting you and you put together the hottest from in new york and it bless the two years you walked away fifty million dollars you understand this whole thing i mean we don't wanna work for these people we do we do all this business these guys just go out to lunch and they smoke some cigars they drink all day and would we're giving them a hundred and fifty grand month he said we wanna have our own firm i said i didn't wanna do that i had just done that i wasn't interested really it's a lot of work i mean you can retire her at this point i was retired i was sort of retired i wasn't really working i wasn't so they said look i get engaged i got married i buy my wife a big house on long island on the beach we have a beautiful apartment in manhattan we start making babies and we get dogs and always these good things and then these guys are begging me so i said i'll tell you what i'll do i don't wanna own shit i i don't wanna own shit but if you want it your name and you wanna run it and listen and that i'll help you so i i did i walked them through the whole thing now late later on the government would accuse me of secretly owning the firm why would i have to secretly own this firm i owned a firm five minutes before and ten minutes i after in my name why would i secretly own this little shit bucket of a of a firm do you understand how they try and i do it they try and find the crime when there was none that's their big thing you secretly ran this broken dealer i didn't secretly own anything anything i own i own and if i don't want wanna i don't i don't own it not interested i mean it's the stupidest thing in the world if it's worth doing owning i'm gonna own it but if i'm helping a guy i'm helping a guy so now these guys that weren't for me were not the sharpest guys the hardworking working good guys the second they had their own firm drinking smoking sn because now they're making real money making a couple of million a month we're killing it any place i seem to go in the brokerage world everybody wanted to come i'm just like a guy got a broke broker yeah i know the game i'm very verbal i'm a i'm very good at rating and i'm a natural leader and so once i got the hang of it i don't need anybody else i just do and then if guys wanna come in the more the mary let's go as long as you're clean and you a decent guy these guys stop being decent guys stop being clean guys and at some point along the way i said you know what i don't wanna be associated with these guys anymore this came up my trial i said you guys wanna get rid of me because i started i complain but it's not my phone i don't have the power but i'm a ross man mandela and i'm like i don't like this i don't approve that they started doing things sneaking around domestic violence beating up their girlfriends because they're stone they doing all kinds of crazy you got them crazy they went like when i was in my early twenties when i went crazy they weren't crazy they were going crazy we never would have ever had access to this kind of money or power but i show them i gave them and i put the key in the engine and i showed him how to do all these different things so i said i gotta get out of i gotta get myself extra educated from this so i said i'll tell you what guys we we made a deal a a legitimate deal they were lloyd i was loyal it was a you know it was you know aerial but we came to a deal pay me seventy grand a month you know added item for them it's a great deal because the business is making seven hundred grand a month or with my business did i let them run i took seven grand a month i said i'm out we have a baby we're at the beach two thousand at the end of the nineties i'm making money in the market i'm trading this i'm trading that everything dot com dot com i'm very content i'm set up i'm now married i've got a child i have two dogs of beach house and a beautiful manhattan apartment four cup i'm just i have the perfect life and i'm sitting at my so one day my my my daughter was she was born in february of two thousand she's a few months old and in march of two thousand was the big dot com crash did dot com bubble burst and to give you an example the biggest company in the world was called world come telephone company went to zero fraud biggest company in the world the fourth biggest company in america the biggest energy company zero and run zeroed out loosened technologies eight plus rated a bell company from eighty two to zero the amazon the jeff bezos amazon you guys all know three hundred three dollars to three it's been revealed now by jeff bezos himself was that he was close to going out of business for months after months close to went to bankruptcy almost miss payroll all these different things at the end of the world apparently and they're p people on television them i'm i'm sitting at babysitting sitting for my newly born kid and i'm watching cnbc at a beautiful office at a beach house five thousand square feet i put eight hundred thousand into the backyard with multi level decks and gardens and all kinds of great stuff and i'm watching all these guys they're prey on television trying to promote the market it's just a quick downturn by the dip it's gonna come back if you got quality everything comes back it's a stock mark moron f moron f moron operating and i'm looking at this going i don't i can't nobody gets it i don't get it i can't imagine how stupid everybody is every once in a while the deck is res shuffled in every industry it's just the law of business if you study business if you study industry you'll see it happens all the time and i'm listening to these people and i take out a pad and i start doing what i do i stephanie always say i always know by how many pads you have out out money at my it's my pads out and i'm sketching some shit and i realized something at that moment i already have the the house the wife to kid the cause the dogs i'm happy my drug of choice has always been more pick up the font i call one of my favorite lawyers and i say rick let me tell you what i wanna do and i walk him through the structure of a brand new international investment bank at brokerage business i said nobody gets it we're gonna be able to buy assets for five cents on the dollar in the burnt up brokerage brokerage sector and i create a prospect a document and i give them the structure i've got own seven million shares there's gonna be another seven million shares in the comp in the in the treasury i'm gonna sell six million shares for a dollar fifty we'll bring in nine million dollars we'll pay a million in commissions and then i wanna a million shares i'm gonna give out to people i care about that have value and i'm gonna take that company public on a foreign stock exchange he's like you drinking again so this is really not a thing when you're doing when you're pitching this idea to y'all my them i'm telling them what i'm gonna do it's not an idea that anyone's done before no no but i just i feel like people just don't get certain things and it was just the wide open opportunity it's like what i see in the media game you ever you see what i see today you see things different that's what i do that's why you make money i have a different sense of vision i mean i've i've been in the a different game than most people i actually see the field i see how the plays evolve you know it's like listen i never played hockey and i gotta to watch a hockey game and i love it so quick i have no idea what the fuck going on but they have like organized plays and guys are positions in positioned themselves i'll tell you something when you play hockey there's a sense that you develop when you play hockey and it only comes from doing it for long enough but when you're on the ice because hockey moves like that it's insanely fast and when you're on the ice you know exactly what's gonna happen it's like there's nothing else except you've just seen that thing a thousand times and you know exactly what's gonna happen every single sequence of events before it happens about five to ten seconds or thirty seconds before and you have this sense so i know when one guy dumps a puck i know where the i i don't even have my vision when i can tell you you feel it without without looking where every single person is on the ice behind me and exactly where they're going and exactly where they've been in exact play they're gonna do next but when you're playing with the pros everyone has that exactly right which is heating all that everyone has it but it's like you have this six cents this you know you can see into the future in an instinct to sense a vision so you just you know i have that with the stock market yeah and i have that what you mean but even better than that i have it i specifically have it you know so you told them to like situational hockey yeah right they dumped the you know they dumped the puck they get into the crease you know you know the moves that okay so i see what's coming with media technology and the stock market i see it you see a podcast and named joe rogan who gets a two hundred million dollar contract for spotify and people say to me how can they pay you your to one of million allows were they crazy and i see what spotify is gonna do but you also see what's spotify made on their market cap i know well that's secondary yeah i know i see where is going yeah i see all the off shoots that are coming i get it i see it like i see the two weeks sit here it's crystal clear me and in two thousand in two thousand i saw the same thing and so i created it i created like almost a thesis and i wrote it and that's called sky capital i'm writing one now for raw media the same thing i just want don't you to understand that i'm saying this live hello hawaii you to his seven hundred thousand followers and subscribers i see it clear as day and that's why i'm doing raw media because i don't need this you know what i mean i should just go to sometimes i why don't you just go by a boat and go around the world and this and that because this is a legacy thing for me i don't want the last big chapter in verse written on the story of ross man to be he went to prison made a lot of noise in the stock market and then they got it him because he's a quirk anchored that that's not my legacy that's not that's not the way i'm going out i want something that my family my kids are prayers can see that my years have being wrongfully prosecuted wrongfully incarcerated they legally marshal the evidence against me i want that record to say this is just an asterisk in the story of rose though just like donald trump's story is not gonna be that he was a seventy seven year old ex president billionaire who was convicted of ninety two counts felony counts and then they took away his business it took away the money from his children all the different things that they were gonna do to him if he didn't win this election donald trump is in prison right now just so you know and you know he you can change the past by doing things today that's what cabal says and i gave someone an example of that recently and to make a long story short so it's two thousand i sketch out a proposition and people laughed at me they laughed at me all the guys that were paying this seven grand a month that were cheating customers and getting jailed for domestic violence and doing drugs during the day at the your all the things that are ridiculous they laughed at me they all thought you know mark collapse and watch a two thousand you it's coming back soon mh i ended up buying their firm for paper i signed them all up not i gave none of them an upfront dollar i bought the assets of nine different firms in a year for no money paper turns out to pay they had a lot of value because i'm good at this kind of thing i bought a whole bank for a hundred and twenty million dollars i only paid it was the bank had had a hundred thousand customers with accounts and had done five hundred million in turnover over the year before i always spent two million cash i bought it for for twenty million shares of stock at six dollars and they got the money they got the whole hundred twenty two million dollars because i'm good at it but so i made this proposition they laughed i created a document i created a website i lined up people that i respect like and no could add value i saw pitched it and then a couple guys put money in then all of a sudden and i was doing this i took a space i didn't wanna be associated with this other firm but when i'm accused of secretly controlling i took a space down the block one ten wall street nice building i took a room about this big a thousand a month i hired a little puerto rican girl that needed a job she never she was no good but mary i'm sorry but how are you baby hope you're good it's like a great grandmother and she's like thirty the the girls are family they sexually active very early panel or i don't know how they do it but they have kids you know and you know she's like this looking thirty five year old ago and she's already grandmother just the i understand the math mouth on the right so crazy so from that rule that one thousand that one thousand dollar month sweet next year you know the guys of across the street see i take a whole floor i won ten wall street and i send dell two million dollars and buy what all the best equipment i have because my network guy for the plan that i a very ambitious plan global trade cross border etcetera our different currencies all that i needed to you know we didn't have the cloud then everything was the land the local you know everything was yeah your own network had to be locked out the room was like you know it was like a holy temple yeah it had to be like sixty sixty three degrees i had have a guy twenty four seven alarms this this that back and forth so i get this dell equipment delivered a month late at nine eleven i'm the only one on wall street that has equipment when you think about it after everything you've gone through how do you wake up and still wanna build after all the bullshit that you've been through is it is it a legacy play is it a peep what drives i'm gonna tell you the truth you know i could give you some canned bullshit answer oh are the the truth but like my the people are very nice to me generally i'm a nice guy first of all you've gotten to know me a little we've spent a lot of hours together i'm respectful i'm i'm kind i can verify the rna got ahead i i believe in in in in elevating people and saying nice things to people i can make jokes all these different things but i'm considered funny guy but i really can't what my family thinks of me i have children i have two daughters one day they're gonna have children and i worked hard i'm a hard worker like you i'm a hard worker you know when i put my head down i could look up and day whole day's gone i don't even know what happened yeah and like i had a whole day before i even came to see you today a whole day then drove to miami but to make a long story short it's really important to me and if i needed the money right now i'd work i like and i know guys so called i sell anything but i'm sixty eight years old i feel like god gave me the strength the mo and the fort to do something with my life the rest of my life when i was in prison i helped i literally help hundreds of people hundreds of inmates including offices i many officers in the b will we'll we'll testify to that so for many of them follow me with social media and and and the emmy and stuff and not allowed to do that all and all that but they do it and i feel like god has giving me some gifts and my program when i got clean there's like i told you it's called twelve steps right well the twelfth step is to give back if you wanna keep what you have you have to give it away it was freely given to you you have to give it away and it's the old adage like whatever i give i get back tenfold i could i could testify to that on my light and the lives of my children it's a this is like a principle in the universe that just hold like gravity for me and i feel like i can help i feel like i can help almost everybody i hate to say it like that i don't need to be i am full of myself and i'm probably a narcissist and all least i am and it's probably true but at this point in my life i think i think if i didn't feel that way then what have i real done in my life and you know the greatest feeling i've had in my life is when i help other people and i see the light go on in their eyes i have a amassed of my program that we do charge for and it's been the greatest gift to me because i'm not in the in my industry i'm not in the wall street and i can help anybody when it comes to the markets and i do i do help people but helping people med navigate life business family stress anxiety mh legal stuff everything and and women too now and it's just one of the most rewarding things ever my ex wife was listening in on a couple of these mastermind and she goes this is your calling you could sit in your apartment here in your eighties and just help people as long as you could talk and so i feel like i have a higher calling i do all the things that i've just shared with is very honest for my heart i can't what i can't what my kids think when i get out of prison my kids wanted very little to do with me so you know i wasn't allowed to appear in a picture with them putting them in social media forget it dad i i would there was some point when they first started going out meeting me for family dinner remember they live without me for ten years do were little girls eleven and fourteen when i went in and they were highly embarrassed kids cruel they had to get off social media for a while american greed came out to this day with if you say american weed to my wife she gets t she's not crawling like it's affected deeply what did she do wrong and people come at hard because people cruel and i wanna change the narrative i wanna leave a legacy that's positive that's reflective up to the life i've actually lived not some fucking horse shit i mean if donald trump didn't win this election and he would go down as like one of the biggest challenges in the history of america instead he might very well go down as one of the greatest presidents in history of america wild how think about that he that's like my story you know so so but but i'm gonna say like this now because i wanna get very honest with you guys i sort of love this shit i don't feel sixty eight i'm like invested now in this podcast business i'm invested in this sort of to ship and building a media company fund i could smell you know they sell shock can smell the blood in the water from a mile away if you're flap your your arms he it's splashes they could sense the sound from a my i feel like i can see what's coming with raw media from a mile away i see it anything in my life that i've seen that clearly happens so now i'm sort of like hooked because i will say up until a few months ago i could've walked away i coulda just said fuck it's not worked just not worth it i even if i needed money i adam them and get money i don't need to do all this shit to make when i sit my in front of my computer i'm easy for me do this my whole life but i feel like i can do something really great and you notice you scott cla hockey player it from from toronto right an executive from ottawa right you now command the eyeballs moving in a million you command over a million eyeballs you it's crazy how great is that though yeah that's the miracle of what we're all doing here today how many people gonna see this in the clips and all these different things so if you really intent on changing narrative or doing good what a platform this is if you really wanna help people what a plant god has given us this gift when i was growing up it was like black and white tv and there was three channels three channels now there's blew a thousand channels and nothing interesting to watch you know you've been through the highest of highs lowest of lows in your life by the way literally literally lot of guys usually phrases yeah i've known i've been to the top of the mountain and i've been to the depths of fucking hell i haven't have you what's your what's your definition of the success and a life well lived after you've been to both i'm gonna tell you so depending who you are where you are in life your definition of success is gonna change and this is a big thing in prison guys talk about this a lot a lot of prison philosophers you know well there's a lot of dummies in prison but there's some really brilliant minds in prison too it's interesting and other points of view but i have a very specific definition of success today and i'm really by my definition i'm i'm i'm becoming very successful and that's really what makes me that's what drives me the most right now would share that with your audience and you after spending you know a lot of time in prison with nothing to do but read and pray and do push ups and try and better myself it's a lot of time wasted my definition of success today for ross man and mandela and this is specifically to me is to have such a life that my adult children wanna hang out with me when's the last time you want to hang out with your parents not talking to you specifically but when's the last time you wanted to hang out with your parents it's not too often generally speaking we do it as an obligation and it's sad because you can actually count how many times you're gonna spend with your parents for the rest of your life and it's not a lot well it depends so my definition my kids today wanna hang out with me i was gonna ask my daughter called me up dad elliott going to you know the soccer game with his friends so i'll be alone you think he could pick me up we can hang out we go out to lunch maybe we'll go shopping went to p vid in fort lauderdale last sunday a little shopping walk it around hung out in her apartment we took a nap we both fell asleep on the couch took little snooze i mean you know i said you know if you're a a young woman who are you gonna feel comfortable taking an nap with besides your boyfriend not many people like you're dad right you both we both we ate so much and we we we we both took us the best kinda lunch by the way the best well my other door daughter like daughter like dad listen i have a date i'm gonna be in miami for the weekend could you go feed my cat and sit with them like an hour very spoiled cap very spoiled cat so i go over there equals got that way i thought you gonna i he said any anywhere between nine and you know nine or ten so i was gonna go at ten oh okay now when you're there dad can you take some video take some pictures she's you know hold i get sure i don't know and i you come in and run out but it what a gift yeah that i can do this for flight kids and we go off for dinners and you know i told you i made a deal to produce a movie called blind grade starring michael ka who was one of the original power ranges he's got the blue power time force yeah yeah and he was in one hill the the teen drama the show on tv and he may made he's made two movies last year and five movies since twenty twenty and i've got a hundred tv commercials he was i'm was a real guy and he was we had signed we had made the deal signed the deal but everything was on zoom and you know online etcetera on the phone and he was i assisted come in and meet my family and my close team because we were all now going to produce this film and we're all part of it and his this some moving parts and i said to my kids i'd love for you guys to come and they were sight to come to the dinner we went to pre president was shout out north military room boca rat town and that we had an amazing dinner like over fourteen people came and left and but it it's to me that's what success is because in order for your children your adult children to wanna spend time with you a you gotta be pretty cool you gotta be doing some pretty cool things because everybody's you know everybody you know wants to have a good time they don't wanna just be the up you know spend that obligatory couple hours with their parents and so to me that's really great and when my ex wife wants to do things for me yeah she still works with you and hang out with me i know i'm winning boy i'm winning because she's a true a true yards the true measure of what is successful she has her own definition and it's a much more substantial definition no but i i like your definition definition a lot that's how i feel today i was your right at a different field you know was a all different but i'm just letting you know i like that i like that one of one of your favorite ideas that you have that i think will really hit with people after they know your story now this is not a dress rehearsal you don't get a mu again there are no due overs this is your life this is it yeah you know i mean people sitting let me think about it what think about what you you know another one my to me is become my favorite you know life is not a spectator sport get off the bench and get in there you're the star of your life you the star of your life you know if your life was put the big screen would you be excited is it meaningful was it a dud i mean get in there enjoy mixing it up do some things take a chance have some fun i mean we don't get another chance at this you i place to play golf with my friends you know we're hackers you know and you know guy will will tee off we don't like to shot i'm taking a mu i'm like what's a mu again i thought it was like a an irish stu so what to do over i said i don't understand what where did this what what rule book is this and everybody knows it's mu you know you it's like funny and and that's what that's that's that's life yeah get in there baby you lost nearly a decade of your life even more than that real more than that what's the that's that's just tough i mean what do you see now he mentioned your family which you know that's probably gonna be part of this answer but what's the most precious thing in the time that you do have left on this earth you know i like to be productive yeah there's a difference between actually being productive and feeling productive if you ever thought about it you'd be able to come up with your own your own concepts of that but i i like to feel productive not just to be productive because sometimes you just go through the motions of life of business and you're really not feeling productive once you just go into the motions you're pho it in that's why like people say like live let truly live life listen you could do anything why are you driving to miami to do you just with scott why are you going drive you're driving these sixty years old you you're gonna drive to miami and do this i'll tell you a good story about this one day i get invited to matt cox podcast i love his podcast me too yeah he's a good guy so he's in tampa i'm in boca it's about a four hour ride this is right after the heart most recent hurricane my plan was to get up early in the morning and drive from boca to tampa do its podcast maybe an hour maybe ninety minutes whatever everyone's got different and then i'll drive back and when i got out of prison i was i had some health issues had a couple i had of scar to i had some things that i'm fine but there was no explanation for what happened but you know they say mister man mandela you speed all days are over you know it's you know i i'm sixteen i'm about eighty eight but you know shit happens but you know i i'm a i'm a believer that you know if you're gonna play in the big leaves if you're a big guy you're play hurt you don't just sit on the bench you don't just phone it in so i i said i wanna do this and nelson will say you know steph is like call nelson he'll drive you i said i of course he would but i wanna do this shows i don't understand are you crazy you you you're gonna drive across the state do a pack and drive home in one day really give a great thought but yeah what the hell what the fuck what i what am i not i'm not you know doing construction in the hot sun yeah you just drive and laying in the box right so little did i know so i got up i drove there it was a good four hours and there was shit over the roads when you got towards the west coast of florida is bad there's a couple of d tours and i get there and i said friday's was sitting to start i said so like what do you like to keep it to an hour i was new at this i had no idea forty minutes i mean what's the time left goes he goes bro you're fucking rust man mandela we're gonna be here until you can't find another word to say we want whatever you're gonna talk we're gonna record you're here i know you guys know i can probably talk they said we've been here for four hours before five hours and thirteen minutes later you did a five hour podcast with him five hours and thirteen minutes i thought i will i wasn't five hours that he published he listen okay forty six thousand views five hours and thirteen minutes just recently i i just discovered this yesterday but i see did in january he cut out a twenty minute clip specifically about the stock market and just posted that but it was five hours and thirteen minutes now we spoke for a half hour before and about a half hour after and then i first had to drive home four hours animal was a great day it was a great day and you know stuff he's like pull over get a hotel room you know what i mean like people like it's funny so i drove you know of course my counterpart over there he goes to orlando he takes a hotel you know it's a manic pedicure he's yeah you know what you're doing you're doing living yeah yeah my brother nelson you know i'm just saying so i we were eight hours driving five hours of podcasting an hour a half hour a half hours so it's a big day right and i wasn't really feeling great but i did it and you wanna know what it was a great day it was a great day and he asked why did you do it i said i wanted to see if i could i wanted to test myself i've been locked up for ten years i didn't drive a car at ten years the only thought i was in a car was when they chain me up and they moved me from place to place you know what i mean the back of a van the leg chains waste chain i even wouldn't believe it so i said here i could drive and did i get paid for that no did it cost me money to do this it did two full tanks of gas and i don't know what the hell i but the point i make to you is that it was a great feeling coming to see right today this is great it's great i mean you're great guy the great studio you know it's my story i your story i feel like you got to know you and it's it's but you know we're not doing heavy construction we're not welding you know of three thousand people at sea level you know we're chatting and it's air condition it's nice bro and so i think it's true and if if if if we if we help one person if one person gets any sort of help or comfort from this we entertain them we did a good thing you've given a lot to to the audience and i appreciate you what's one last sort of some words of wisdom that you wanna leave them with or something that we didn't go into that you think would be helpful for the audience and when they're trying to navigate life business or just outside of business just life in general you know i'm i'm gonna borrow this from someone that was revealed to be one of this smartest men in the history of the world and on his deathbed said and i repeat this to the audience mine you know anything that can be solved or cured by i by either time or money is an issue not a problem it's very important to understand this in the general routine of life people believe they have these problems they don't have problems most people don't have problems but have issues and if you can cure if you can cure a circumstance with money with time it's not a problem you have an issue so i did time i i literally checked into a prison in two thousand fourteen and i essentially didn't get released to two thousand twenty four that wasn't a problem it was an issue no issues are serious but it was an issue a problem is different you have a brain tumor he days a number that's a problem so these are things that people should really consider because i believe that with the masters of our own fate largely i feel that god our creator a maker gives us an opportunity to conquer lives our own lives we can conquer our own lives i believe everybody has the ability to become very successful whenever their own definition of success it's very important trying to find success i was on the phone with a a beautiful woman who you met last week and i said what are the five most important things to you in the world think about it don't answer what are the five most important if i was a genie a aladdin genie rub the lamp i come out if you don't have anything in the world what are the five things you want what are the five most important things to you and that's your starting point in life i'd say you triangulate where you are so a lot of people wanna be successful they wanna be successful in business they wanna be successful in life in a relation and podcast on the stock market in you know basically in in any endeavor and i think that everybody would be successful because i think people just about everybody wants to be successful but nobody understands and there's a million books there's a million shows there's a million podcast there's a million theories about how to be successful in the stock market in relationships i mean they had stories for everything but people don't know where the starting line is where do i just show me where you know just show me where i show up where the race starts and i can run the race because i'm on with google and books and wisdom and philosophers and mentors people don't understand where they show up where's the starting line and i think that's one of the most important things and anything that can be solved with time or money is just it it's just an issue people don't have problems like they think they do can't pay the rent my job i don't have enough to live how am i gonna support my children i mean these are issues don't don't make them more than they are because even when you see a hill no problem when you see a fucking mountain you're like like god i can't do it and that's very important to put things into perspective that's very wise when people see problems when people see issues as problems doc and sabotage their whole life well that's what happened that is sabotage yeah that's what happens and so that's why i tried to put that into perspective it takes a lot of thinking and understanding and i don't wanna start to finding the different specific problems because then the people that listen that actually have problems are gonna panic did wanna tell you look a little bit like ben i haven't heard this before i'm staring it you and i feel like i'm looking at ben something the worst there listen shit yeah you know that's a good thing a good thing that's definitely not a problem or an issue i'll take that every i look at you the more see ben apples is that correct where can people connect with you where can people find more about raw media about some of the content you're working on all that thank you ross man del dot com is a website ross is double s man mandela was m a n d e double l dot com just like it sounds a ross man mandela on instagram on facebook i have a a a friend page and a fan page follow me hit me up tell your friend request i'm on youtube the real ross man mandela please subscribe info at ross man mandela dot com my team is twenty four seven they'll respond i promise you within a few hours at at at worst have a mentorship program where i mentored people i mastermind up my program i consult if you have a business if you have a company if you have an issue or if you have a problem last thing i always like to ask you've even over a lot of wisdom and you mentioned a few times important your family your kids are if you had to pick out of all the different things that you've learned over your life and you could only pass on you're only allowed in this exercise that pass on one lesson to your kids what would that lesson be in way invest in yourself believe in yourself don't buy what everybody's selling don't buy the illusion success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there in this lessons episode explore the core principles of lasting success and why clarity and responsibility drive achievement discover how to define a clear purpose and translate it into actionable goals understand why mindset and beliefs shape outcomes more than circumstances and uncover practical strategies to pivot and uncertainty and turn challenges into opportunities so first of all i guess i don't wanna do a a multifaceted question but what are the principles and how do you ensure that you have to drive to to stick with it which is i'm sure one of the main factors well you first yeah i was in india for most of february mostly went over there just to get healthier at just retreat place where they do how you're ready medicine and i wasn't sick but i just wanted the longevity kind of stuff and there was a doctor there who was worth about sixty million dollars he was in the lineage of doctors that were buddhist doctor you're doing medicine for twenty five hundred years and his teacher who lived to be a hundred and fourteen said to him and then he said to me the the three things you need to know to be happy in life is number one what you want know how to get it and know how to enjoy it once you get it and most people fall down in one of those stages either they don't know what they want you ask them what do you want well i know wanna be rich i wanna be independent but what does that mean it's not specific they don't really know what that lifestyle would look like they're not they're not clear the second thing is how to get it and most people don't know i mean you and i went to schools that did not teach you how to be successful they taught you history and literature and math and i always say you know nobody nobody failed in life because they didn't know the five causes of a french american war you know it's just never happened that way and yet they don't know how to set goals they don't know i mean we have a statistic now that says only ten percent in north americans that includes the united states and canada know how to set they graduate high school having learn how to set goals they don't know why to do it they don't know how to do it they don't the importance of it they don't know the research behind and once they set a goal they've never been taught what are the steps to actually achieve it i believe we should have a course in school called self science education or life one zero one skills or something like that and literally starting in middle school all the way through high school you got kids graduate and you can't even balance a checkbook let a alone set a goal and achieve it or start a business you know we're training people to be employees we're not training people to be entrepreneurs you know up until fifteen years ago you couldn't even go get a degree in entrepreneurship let alone learn those kind of skills in a school one of my friends who actually lives in in vancouver runs a association of dance instructors and dancing schools and he said to his kids once he said i want you to go write either an application to college or a business plan and his daughter wrote a business plan son wrote an application to college and they came back and it was a weekend assignment he was gonna give him twenty bucks if they did it and the one wrote the application the college said wrong answer he he said you're never gonna get rich just because you go to college you're gonna get rich if you learn how to run a business and so basically i think people unfortunately are learning to be employees go to schools sit still don't you know don't don't rock the boat do what you're told graduate go work for someone do the same thing as opposed to learn how to think creatively set goals go out and achieve and build a team reinforce that learn how to bring investment money into your life and so forth so any way to go back to your question like what are the principles basically what i've done in the success principles workbook which i'll just hold up so everyone can see what it looks like here this just came out recently is i've taken seventeen of the sixty four principles that are in the success principles book the core principles the things you need to do the absolute basics and we've put them in order so the first one is take a hundred percent responsibility for your life most people are blame complain and excuse makers you know we see that even now with the coronavirus we have the president of the united states blaming the chinese blaming the world health organization everyone's like blaming someone else to do nothing congress the democrats blamed the the republicans or republicans blame the democrats nobody's focused on how do we just get it done so i teach this formula in that first principle e plus r equals o an event plus your response to the event equals an outcome so whatever the event is the event could be your wife leaves you the event could be you get sick the event could be the coronavirus the event could be a recession the event could be a new technology comes along and put you out of business just like uber really write out a lot of taxi cab and limo companies and so that's an event how you respond to the event is what produces the outcomes you experience in life in other words your health your happiness the quality of relationships those are all outcomes of how you've responded to an event we know that there are people during the last recession who got really wealthy there are other people during that same recession who didn't you know i just heard robert k recently talking about the hero reached poor dad he was talking about how when the recession was coming and he saw it coming he went and brought a lot of money and when all these properties went belly up he bought them at a at a low price he's now billionaire just because he did that so part of it is seeing the trends studying trends noticing the trends i grew up in west virginia you hear all these coal miners saying well we everything sucks no one's using coal anymore and blah blah well they saw that coming for twenty years nobody wanted to change because was uncomfortable and so basically change requires people to be uncomfortable and do something new do something different the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the house hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their backend end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the op authority wherever you get your podcasts success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base square it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there when the coronavirus pandemic started the business owners who pivoted and did something uncomfortable did something different they're surviving the people that just went oh this is not right this is not fair you know i saw i saw i saw a they call it memes the other day it was a it was a vision board and he said i didn't put this shit on my twenty twenty vision board and no owens one's saw it coming but that's a perfect example yeah so how do you react yeah like you know i don't know if you're familiar with a company called b and i business network international guy named ivan me started that and then i'll have like ninety five hundred chapters around the world think the nine thousand five chapters well the ceo of that when his strengths started to happen in december in china realized this was because of a reality of this and the ability of it to to to move so quickly he said this is gonna come all over the world and they have chapters all over the world so he started then to figure out how to put this whole thing online and do it through zoom calls you know all their chapter meetings and they and they pulled it off they were ready when it happened unfortunately you know our health care system in america did not do the same thing and that we have these real huge hot spots in new york and you know detroit and chicago and louisiana and so forth so i think the reality is that we have to not blame we have to take responsibility and then our are our response to the event is what gives the outcome so there's only three responses you can have to anything your thoughts about it the images you conjure up in your head about it and then what you say and do your behavior and so a lot of people right now and probably going forward for months or in fear they're in anxiety they're imagining bad things happening if you're in the present moment you and i are in the present moment we're having a great conversation you've got food you have some money everything's good and so the reality is in order to feel free you have to go into the future and go well three months for now not gonna be good three months for now i might lose all my clients three months for now but it's not three months for now it's now so fear is required in there words in order to get afraid you have to go into the future if there was a snake in your office right now slit toward you and you started to get afraid the only reason you were afraid is because you're imagining biting you hasn't been you yet you have to go into the future so what we want people to do is come back to the present whatever you're in fear your energies in the amygdala which is a back part of your brain the lower brainstem stem and fear hijack the prefrontal cortex right up here and so the prefrontal cortex is where you have your rational thoughts and where you have creative thoughts and right now more than anything as business people as anyone who wants to be success in any area of your life you have to be able to think clearly and also to think creatively and so what you wanna do is not be in fear and there's a lot of things you can do about that number one is coming at a present moment right now everything's fine the other thing is create positive images of the future rather than negative images of the future zig z who is a great motivational speaker said once fear is negative goal setting worrying is negative goal setting you're imagining something in the future you don't want just as easy to stop the movie and replace it with an image of what you want and so you see a lot of people that are doing that people that are starting to say okay for months i wanted to to take my business online i wasn't doing it well now i kinda have to for months i wanted to you know lower my staff and do more outsourcing well now i have to and so basically i think that we just have to like a hundred percent responsibility to realize it's not the coronavirus it's not the pandemic it's not our government it's not the economy that's ruining our lives it's our response and two plus two equals four it always will so if i've been getting four the world's doing too i'm doing two four is comfortable we're great all of a sudden the world does one and for some people right now the world's doing zero you can't do zero plus two and get four so you've gotta change what you're doing and here's the bad thing about that or the uncomfortable thing i'm gonna ask you to fold your hands like this actually go ahead and do that i'm gonna do that and everyone watching do that and notice what thumb is on top so your left thumb is on top left them yeah yeah it's a mine too now what i want you to do and everyone watching is un clasp your hands and move all the fingers up and notch so the other internet other thumbs on top don't just move your thumbs now how does that that feel feels awkward it feels i don't like it awkward i don't know yeah what does your body wanna do it wants to go right back to where it was before so let it go back to where it was before right and that's where most people are right now they're where they were before and where you were before isn't working anymore yeah they'll do something different so whenever we fold our hands a new way it's going to feel uncomfortable and everything we're gonna do in the future for a while to create the new normal it's going to be uncomfortable it's gonna be out of our comfort zone i always have to say everything you want that you don't have is just outside your comfort zone that call you're afraid to make and don't wanna make because it's uncomfortable that request that you wanna make the putting yourself out in a certain way for a fear of how people would judge you all those things are uncomfortable asking for investors asking for people to buy a product from you when everyone's like holding another their money right now i have friends in my business which is speaking and training or actually making more money right now than they were before year over year last year but forty percent up why because they instantly pivoted put together packages for people reduced the price gave them payment plans and said you're requested at home right now you can't do the normal things you're doing you don't have that hour commute both ways at the end of the day you have two extra hours what could you do with that you can educate yourself you know now if you don't wanna spend money to do you can go to youtube you can go to ted talks you can go to mass your class there's all kind of things on the internet that are available to do but the point is it's not the event it's your response so that's the first principle is you gotta pivot the the second thing is be clear why you're here what is your purpose your most people do not know what their purpose is they don't know what their why is why are they here i believe everyone is born with an in born purpose something they're meant to do sometimes you see it really clearly i have a a nephew he's about three and he already has a total baseball catcher uniform the mask the little chest guard the catcher glove i to did didn't one first base mit then one of out filters met you know and literally at the age of three you could throw him the ball he catches it you throw him the ball he hits it he's he he wants to go to baseball but he started to cry when he heard it might not be a baseball season this year he's three years old so he was very born this passion for baseball someone else is born for a passion to play music someone else was born for a passion to cook i mean i have a chef that comes in when i do events to my house and i hire her to come cook she loves to cook she used to cook with her mother when she was seven years old my wife could care less about cooking you know it's just not the thing a mixer but paint she loves to paint you know so everyone has that thing inside them they're meant to do and if you find that and find a way to monetize it which you can do one of the people i know is all her thinks she wanna do more anything else bought the greatest joy and by the way joy is the signal from your body that you're doing what's on purpose for you so she said my joy is surfing how to help can i make money surfing well i said you could become a coach and you can take women because she likes women you can be on your bikini in hawaii and you can teach women how to surf and you teach him how to surf as a metaphor for how they manage in their companies that if you missed the trend that's coming like if you know anything about surfing you have to paddle before the wave gets there yeah so that it kinda picks you up and get up on the board if you wait too long well you you missed the trends in business are you missing the trends in your staff or are you not seeing what's going on you're not responding fast enough or if you're on surfer you get up on board you go too far forward the board comes out of the way and you tip over are you going far too far ahead of your team right you know and it always pays plays out how you do anything is how you do everything so she's making fifty thousand a month teaching women how to surf because she's charging five thousand dollars she gets five to ten women in her surfing class and she's happy doing what she's doing so once you're clear about your purpose the next thing is to decide what you want what is your vision for her was teaching that for you it might be doing your podcast running trainings having your own company whatever it might be then you say okay what are the goals so i say you have seven areas of your life number one finance number two profession job and career number three family and friends and relationships number four your health and fitness number five fun and recreation number six what we call personal what do you wanna own what what experiences you wanna have what growth experiences spiritual growth personal growth and then last contribution and i want you to have a vision for every area of your life what it would it look like if you were succeeding in the each of those areas and then return that into goals the goal is how much by when so it's one thing to say i wanna live in a nice house on the ocean that's a hope tuition intention but it's not a goal and goal is i will own a three thousand square foot house some pacific coast highway on in malibu california by january third two thousand twenty one five pm so the subconscious mind won't kick in to figure out how to do that until you set a deadline until you make it specific and once you've got that then we have to do you have to believe it's possible that's another thing what are the limiting beliefs that are keeping you from getting there one of the peep people i was working with recently never finished anything and when we went when he went back and looked at what that was about he went back to when he was in high school he was running a mile race and his legs gave out in the last couple hundred yards and he literally told himself i can't finish things and here he is in his forties trying to finish a book and every time he sit down and get close to doing it he would just screw it up he would distract himself he wouldn't do it he create problems in his life etcetera once he went back and realized where that belief came from and changed the belief till i can finish anything i start he finished his book it went on become a best selling book so on and so forth so and and here's the thing about beliefs beliefs are just a choice you can choose to believe anything you want the belief is simply a thought you think over and over and over unfortunately when we go up we we take these beliefs on is if they're they're true you know it's not okay to be angry it's not okay to cry for men's it's not okay to ask for what you want don't be a nuisance you know whatever we got programmed to do but we can totally change that belief through repetition through affirmations and doing the thing that that confronts the belief and finding out the bad thing didn't happen i had a friend who had a belief he could never be stupid the end up going to mit graduated threatens class he was so afraid of looking stupid so he had a therapist to send him to a seven eleven and said you have to go into the seven eleven and say where's the nearest seven eleven and then he sent him to a chinese restaurant and even after he said that he said i'd like a a pizza and they go well this is a chinese restroom restaurant we know serve pizza and he went nothing bad happened they didn't they didn't throw me out nobody hit me my my dad didn't come out of the ether and slap me across the face you know and so those are the three ways like tony robbins teachers if you can't you must if you're afraid to do something just go do it when you do it that's why the fire is so powerful i mean i remember doing the fire with tony and walking across the fire and got to the other end and i said oh my god i didn't think i could do that but else if i've been telling myself i can't do and for about three weeks i was on fire i'm calling everybody doing everything you know it's just like it released so much energy in me and didn't even though i had it what are your skydiving bungee cord jumping you know mountain climbing mountain rap repel whatever the thing is those things really help you confront your fears and then you know as we said before how you do anything how you do everything so it's it's very valuable thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there