How To Expedite Growth, Go Bigger, and Achieve More

What's up, fastlaners? Ryan here. This week I gave two presentations, the same presentation twice to some new audiences that I was traveling to speak to. And I wanted to share the presentation with all of you as well because it was received very well at these conferences. So I wanted to share the insight with you as well. So this is a presentation called how to Expedite Growth, Go Bigger and Achieve More. You don't know who I am and you found this video randomly? My name is Ryan, I'm the son of a single mom and my dad was a schoolteacher for 32ish years. Grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. And there it was pretty much expected that you, you know, you got a job, you went to school, you went to school, you got a job and you waited to die. There's no entrepreneurs in my family. And the only reason why I start this talk with this silly hypey headline of Millionaire Ryan Moran, who cares? Is because a few years ago, that was all the money in the world to me. Having a million dollars in the bank for me equals security. That was what meant freedom and lifelong stability to me. And because of that mindset, it took me seven years. I think part of the reason why it took me seven years to get to that point was because that was a big deal to me, right? I mean, if something is impossible to you, something is big to you, you don't, you're not in alignment with that, you're going to fall short of most goals that you set. So if a million dollars is like the biggest thing in the world to you, you're probably gonna fall short of that. So it took me about seven years of grind and hustle to make my first million. But once I got there and it was demystified, it was illuminated. It took me less than one year to earn the next million million. And today, million dollar projects or million dollar campaigns don't really scare me. They don't really make me feel uncomfortable. And I just tell you that to kind of set the stage because a few years ago a million dollars was a really big deal to me. Now it's good, but it's not a big deal to me anymore. And within that context, I'd like for you to consider the fact that, that you are wired for the exact results that you are getting right now. Good, bad, ugly, pretty, whatever they are. I like to invite you to consider that you are wired for the results that you are getting. And I have a mathematical formula that is really just a demonstration or an idea of how our results are generated. What makes up our results? Our results are our beliefs times our strategy plus our execution times our time equals the results that we get. So you might hear the notion that if you had bought Coke Stock Back in 1850, 150 years ago, you put $100 into it now, it'd be worth like a billion dollars today or some crazy number. And when people give a presentation like that, that sounds great, except most of us don't have 150 years. Most of us are gonna be dead in 150 years. Hey, hopefully not. Maybe Peter Diamandis will get his way and we all will live forever. But as it is right now, most of us aren't gonna be here in 150 years. So you don't have that. But that is a strategy putting it into a very safe dividend paying stock. I own a lot of dividend paying stocks. I believe in that strategy. But I don't have 150 years to put it into that. Your ability to execute can increase the output of this equation. Meaning if you've got the best ability to execute, if you can execute strategies like this, and a lot of people can, then you can crank through mediocre strategies and it will overcompensate for a lack of time or a lack of strategy. If you have the best strategy in the world. For example, I teach a lot of entrepreneurs and some entrepreneurs have better strategies than others. And if they have a better strategy, then the results are going to be better within the context of this execution. But this first part, your beliefs, is how I describe where we set our targets, what we set our eye in, what we're moving toward. I'm not a law of attraction kind of person. I'm not kind of in that mindset of attracting things into our lives. Except for the fact that our beliefs tend to drive our behavior. Our beliefs are what put us on a path to form, our strategy and our execution, and how much time we're willing to put into something. So I put on a workshop for entrepreneurs. It's called the Next level. It's for people who have about million dollar businesses. And we help them come up with strategies that will expedite their growth and make them grow a lot bigger. And I run them through this exercise that I call the 10x exercise. And it looks very simply like this. Number one, where are you right now financially? How much are you bringing in per month? So person might write down $100,000 a month. And then the second question I ask them is, where do you want to be? And they might Write down, I want to be at $250,000 a month. Great. Now, question number three. Take what's in box number two, where you want to be, and times that by 10. And invariably someone will write, 2.5.

I want to change my number. And this opens up an interesting conversation, because now we have a conversation where somebody says, I want to Change my number. $2.5 million sounds really hard to me. It's not really where I want to be. So I want to revise my first number. I really only want to be at $150,000 a month. Or somebody will say, I feel really anxious because I have no idea how I'm going to do 10 times what my desired goal is. And for about 10 to 20 minutes, we have an interesting conversation about what comes up when somebody writes down a 10x goal. And then I pause and I say, well, this is very interesting because all I've really asked you is what the mathematical calculation of where you want to be times 10 is. And we do this exercise because it creates an environment in which we can analyze how our beliefs are driving certain behaviors. If we believe that $2 million a month is a lot of money, then we put a certain amount of heaviness on that. We put a certain amount of thought power on that. At some point, that person may have thought that $100,000 a month was a lot of money, but they're there now, and they're really not that much different. The only thing that's changed is the money that's coming into their business. So I asked them this fourth question, and that's how would you have to think what would have to be normal for you in order for this 10x goal to be normal to you? Because if we can demystify that, if we can illuminate that, then we make it much more likely that they can normalize that idea, that financial amount, and thus move forward closer to their goals. So what drives our beliefs? What makes up our beliefs? Our beliefs are made up of our associations and our input. So the people you hang out with and the things you allow into your brain are what drive our beliefs. Why do some countries have different beliefs about finances, about government, about marriage? Who's right, who's wrong? Depends on what your beliefs are. You're right, because they're your beliefs. We derive that from who we hang out with and what we allow into our brains. The books you read, the people you hang out with, the podcasts you listen to, the videos that you watch. That's how we derive our Beliefs.

We base these beliefs and thus become what we think is normal, what we perceive to be normal. You don't have any beliefs that you don't think are normal. That's why they're your beliefs. So all of your beliefs are what is normal to you?

We base all of our comparisons, all of our analyses, all of our judgments as a comparison to what we believe is normal. So all of us are walking around with a certain perception of normal in our brains. And when we make a judgment, when we compare something, it's simply comparison to what is normal. So is a guy who makes a million dollars a year rich? I don't know. What are you comparing them to? Is a guy who has 10% body fat fit? Depends on what you're comparing it to. All of our evaluations and our judgments are a comparison based on what we perceive is normal. There was supposedly a study done. I haven't verified this, but I was told once that there was a study done that was basically an analysis of what made people happy. And assuming this is a true story, what they, whoever they is, found, is that happiness is the difference between your reality and your expectation. So what you got compared to what you think you were going to get is what you did was what determines your happiness. Now, some people, this is a side note, some people will see this and they'll say, all right, so I guess the secret to happiness is to lower my expectations. That's actually not necessarily the case. There's another ingredient to this happiness equation, and it's not lowering your expectations, but increasing your appreciation for what you have. So it's not expecting nothing out of life. It's appreciating everything that already is in your life is the secret to happiness. In the same way, success is just an evaluation of our reality minus what we perceive as normal. So what's success? Well, that depends on what your normal is. So if you're in a world of people who make $500,000 a year, and you make $400,000 a year, and you perceive 500,000 as normal, then you probably don't view yourself as very successful. But if you make $400,000 a year and you live in a world where it's normal to make $50,000 a year, you evaluate that as fairly successful. So success is arbitrary. It's a story in your head. This is the problem of it all. Normal is a bullshit perception in the first place. So it's just a comparison that you're making in your brain all of the time. There is no normal. There's just what we perceive as normal. It doesn't exist. So we're making judgments, we're making evaluations on no data, just evaluations. They're our own. So we know this gets distorted. Facebook perception causes depression. Fact. We know this being on Facebook causes depression. Why? Because we are invariably comparing ourselves to all the people that are putting out certain perceptions about their life. So if all you see are people partying and girls doing duck faces when they look their best and you evaluate this as normal, which we do because our brains are wired to see about 120 to 300 people as normal or as the standard, and we compare ourselves to this normal that gets created on Facebook that can cause depression. Beauty magazines distort body images. Fact. How is that? Because we see a certain number of people presenting an image of themselves or being photoshopped as an image, we perceive that as normal. We start having body image distortion. Even tragedy and disaster gets normalized. Why? Because we hear about all the bad stuff.

I would even argue, and I didn't run a study on this, but I would even make the case that the reason why school shootings have increased so much in the past decade is not necessarily because more people are carrying guns or not because there's more mental distress, but because we've normalized it as a behavior. We hear about it and it shocks us and then we normalize it so it's bound to happen more often.

I had a conversation with a family member once who we were evaluating if the world was getting worse or if the world was getting better.

Depends on what you listen to, what becomes normal to you. So we normalize tragedy and disaster all the time through the media. An acquaintance of mine, Kyle Cease, likes to ask the question, how unafraid of flying would we be if every time a flight landed they interrupted a news broadcast to say, did we interrupt this news broadcast to let you know that the flight from Mobile, Alabama to Chicago, Illinois has landed safely and all passengers are in good spirits and that we did that a thousand times a day. Nobody would be afraid to fly. But instead we hear about all the crashes that happen. So we normalize that. Entrepreneurs experience this in what Dan Sullivan, who I think is just the greatest entrepreneurial mind on the planet, he calls us the gap. We tend to normalize our situation and we want to grow into something and the grow is out here or out here, then we grow into that, but our next growth is out here. So we are constantly moving in this state of lack as even as we grow, we have this gap that eludes us. And we never really feel happy about that unless we stop to appreciate and compare where we came from rather than where we are going.

Now. We love to talk about growth in the entrepreneurial or self development community, but there's a dark side to growth. So without clear targets, we as entrepreneurs tend to just grow because we think that we're supposed to. And we compare ourselves with that illusory idea and we always lose that battle because we're constantly comparing ourselves to what we perceive rather than where we are or where we came from. So we have this obsession with growth. And some of you may know the Tony Robbins quote where he says progress equals happiness. But if we're in growth mode and growth is not making us happier, then our brain does not interpret that as progress. It's actually a problem. Because if we associate growth with hustle and pain and grinding without a feeling at the end of hitting a target and feeling happy and proud of that, then instead we link growth with pain. And that's not progress. So we're likely to sabotage that. There's a quote that I think defines this well and it's that growth for the sake of growth is the mentality of cancer. So here's how we can flip it. Here's how we can switch the game on its head and actually use it to our advantage by normalizing the behaviors and the results that we want so that they're no longer big or impossible to us. That makes growing into those goals very natural and consistent with our beliefs. So if what we want is normal to us, then it's natural for us to step into that. And it now lines up with our beliefs and our perceptions. If we want happiness at the same time, we simply compare our results as we grow to where we came from and practice active appreciation.

My best friend Mark Jenny saw me give this talk and he said I don't know what people do if they don't have active appreciation practices.

When do you get happy? If you're not actively practicing appreciation, what are you chasing? If you don't appreciate everything that is in your life and where you are going, when do you stop? What's the end game if there's no appreciation? I know very, very few growth minded people who are also happy. I know a lot of happy people who don't grow and I know a lot of growth minded people who aren't happy. But I don't know very many people that are both. And the secret or the missing ingredient between those two is appreciation. So I modify the equation here to Say association times input plus appreciation equals that elusive growth and happiness result.

This is a guy named Friedrich Drumf. He was an immigrant from Germany and he came to the United States and he was forced to be an entrepreneur. From what I have read about Friedrich, which isn't much, my understanding is that he kind of had to become an entrepreneur because I think he was kicked out of Germany or was not a legal immigrant. And he kind of had to do things under the table. So he had some barbershops, which some people think were undercover brothels. And he also started to invest in real estate, and he got pretty good at investing in real estate. So Friedrich unfortunately died fairly young and he had a young son who took over the real estate business. It was, I believe, a mostly commercial real estate business. And his son was Fred Jr. And Fred was a natural born American citizen. So he modernized the family name, turned it into a more English sounding name, and he took over the family real estate business. And Fred grew the company based on what was normal to him, which was negotiating and growing commercial real estate. And he grew it into an empire of between 3 and $400 million, which in today's money would be about a billion dollars. Fred then trained his son to take over the family business and his son grew that into a multi billion dollar worldly recognized name and empire. And this, this gentleman had several kids, one of whom I think is one of the most interesting people alive, and that's Ivanka Trump. Ivanka Trump, in my mind is one of the most interesting living people because she's born into multi generations of a normal that most of us aren't willing to think of her normal, what she perceives as normal. She has no limits, she has no limitations. She hasn't been trained with those limitations. So I don't know what she got from daddy or what she was taught as a little girl. All I know is that by 30 she was worth $100 million, and at 33 she was worth $150 million. She's born into multi generations of infinite limits. And yet at the same time, she has no history or public history of drug abuse or sabotage or unhealthy relationships. All things considered, most people in her stature would be kind of crazy. And yet she's not. And not a lot of, as far as I know, none of this generation of the Trump family has a lot of public issues. And she has two children who will have three generations of absolutely absurd, almost incomparable wealth and a daddy who at least ran for president. God forbid he becomes the president but if that's the case, that's just like another level of normal that this family will have grown into. And.

I would like to invite you to consider the idea that maybe what made the Trump dynasty so successful is partly due to their definition of normal. They don't have limitations. And as a result, you have the Ivanka Trumps of the world, who in her late 20s is worth almost $100 million with her own businesses. Yes, she had great associations and she had the Trump last name, which probably opened some doors for her. But she also has a very interesting view of what normal is based on her associations.

So I'm hoping to open up your mind to the idea that if you want different results, one of the ways that you can do that is to change your idea of what normal is by forcing new associations and different inputs. And again, that's the people you hang out with, the people you listen to, what you read, etc. So in our community, in the world of entrepreneurship and making a lot of money and growth and self development, we're obsessed with that idea of growth and crushing it and hustling. But why then do so many people stay exactly where they are? Why do so many people in this community who are obsessed with growth or talking about growth stay where they are? There's a few reasons. One, the first part of our brain to evolve is the reptilian brain. I've heard it called the croc brain. It's that part of our brain that is made to keep us alive. It's made to.

Just ensure that we survive. It's the same part of the brain that makes my cat run away when I move too fast. It's the part that feels fear. It's the part that tells us something ain't right. We're not safe.

When we listen to that, we tend to stay where we are. We also are very good in our little community of associating pain with growth rather than pleasure. I have a coach who compares this to the little kid in the back of a car who's promised that we're gonna go shopping and driving around for an hour, but at the end we're gonna get McDonald's. And then after an hour, the parent turns to the kid and says, actually it's gonna be 13 hours, but the McDonald's is gonna be amazing at the end of it. And we are really good at just kicking appreciation and satisfaction and gratification so far down the road and that we never really enjoy our success. So we associate pain to growth rather than pleasure to growth. So why in the world would we grow more? We can solve this by putting a clear reason for the growth or what we will enjoy differently once we have hit the target of the growth that we want to experience. But most of us don't set a clear reason or a clear target. We just grow for the sake of growth.

We also tend to experience pain when we perceive something that violates our view of normal. So if we rub against.

A definition of marriage or a definition of wealth, or a definition of government, or someone says something that's weird, or our definition of health, or what will be beneficial for us when we come come into contact with something that violates our view of normal, we experience pain, or we say, alert, alert, alert. There's a threat on the scene. I believe that part of the reason why racism exists, and I'm no scientist or psychoanalyst, but I believe that part of the reason why racism exists is because the part of our brain that says what is normal, mostly who we hang out with, tend to be people who look like us. And then when we encounter somebody who looks different than us, who acts differently than us, the part of our brain that's supposed to keep us alive and say danger goes, hey, this ain't normal. Alert, alert. Now, as we are becoming more open as a society, meaning we interact with people of all types of cultures, I like to think that that will lessen. But anyway, you get the point. When we are, when we see something or perceive something that violates our view of normal, we experience pain. Or the brain says, threat, alert, pay attention.

So if we have targets, if we have desires that violate what we perceive as normal, we'll likely sabotage. So if you want to earn a million dollars a day, but you don't see that as normal, you will likely sabotage that because it violates what you view as normal. In some ways, your brain sees that as a threat.

So what makes you think that you're going to achieve that target?

This is why I bought a Tesla. You can change this version of normal. You can normalize anything. Have you ever, have you ever experienced a rush of some kind? And then after experiencing it a few times, the rush doesn't come as strong anymore? It's because your brain normalizes that behavior. Your brain can also normalize price points, levels of happiness, your self value. So I bought a Tesla because a few years ago I bought my first ever new car. And no one in my family has ever driven a new car to my knowledge. Most people in my family buy used cars, or at least slightly used cars. In fact, it was growing up, I kind of had this thing against new cars. You don't want to drive a new car off the lot. It depreciates 25%. So a few years ago, I broke this pattern. I was very proud of myself. I bought my first ever new car. It was a shiny brand new turbocharged, double moonroofed Kia Sportage. Her name is Bruce. I still own Bruce. She's a beautiful orange Kia Sportage and I love Bruce.

But I noticed that when Bruce had 65,000 miles on it and she started to get a little bit messier and there was a car seat in the back seat where Esther rides in Bruce, I started to notice that my thoughts were a little bit different than the day that I brought Bruce home from the dealership. So I decided to stretch my view of normal. And I bought a brand new Tesla 85D. And I rather enjoy driving my Tesla. I also noticed that when I drive my Tesla, I think a little bit differently than when I drive my Kia. I just have certain different thoughts. I go into a different state of mind. And in that sense, my Tesla was like an investment in my normal, in stretching my view of what's possible, what's okay for me to have.

So we love as entrepreneurs and growth minded people to talk about crushing it and hustling and making a lot of money. But most of the people I know walk around with this deep sense of insecurity that it's all going to go away. Security is not a real thing. It's just a feeling. It's one of those comparisons that you make in your head. And most people have a very low sense of what security is, so they feel insecure. If you don't think that your clients and your customers read into that incongruence, you're either giving your acting abilities too much credit or you're giving yourself too much credit. We can solve this problem by changing what we perceive as normal, practicing active appreciation, and defining the rules for you about what security is.

So security is an illusion. It's a feeling. And you get to set the rules for what makes you feel safe. You know, the game is you get to pick what you compare yourself to. So a few years ago I made, when I was just out of college, I was making good money, but I felt so unsafe, I felt so insecure. And I finally said, this is ridiculous. This is not benefiting me at all. I feel like I need to extract as much as possible to make myself feel safe. This is absurd. This is insanity. So I finally Said, okay, this is what I want in order to make me feel safe. And that was just 100 grand in the bank and a regular investment plan for passive cash flow. If I do that, I feel safe. Great, Now I can take strategic risks. Now I can swing for the fences. Now I can work on stuff that I think matters and that gives you more security because you attract a different level of client. You attract a different level of a different level customer when you're operating from that place. And based on that, my career on my business took off because all of a sudden I defined what I needed to be secure. And then I started swinging for the fences because I'm secure, I'm safe. Now we can take some strategic risks and that provided real security. So here's some things I want you to take away. If nothing else, realize that your results are the product of your beliefs. Combined with your ability to execute a winning strategy over time, you can expedite the speed and magnitude of your results. By changing your beliefs, which are defined by your associations and your input, you experience happiness. By practicing active appreciation, you get to control your perceptions and your definitions of normal. And that will influence your output. And you can change those by changing your input and your associations. So how do you get around higher associations and better inputs? Well, we can change our inputs within like a second by being in masterminds, going to events with high level people, reading books by people who think completely differently than you. Listening to higher level thinkers, attending events that make you uncomfortable, being around people that stretch your view of normal up, leveling the people you hang out with. I call this your success network. An acquaintance of mine named Tai Lopez, he has a great rule of 30. Or somebody asked me, where's the extra 10%? And I was like, alright, I guess the rule of thirds or 33%. Spending 30% of your time with mentors who just scare the pants off you, make you feel uncomfortable. 30% of your time with people at your level, and then 30% of your time giving back to people who don't have as much as you. That ups your active appreciation because you realize that there is a different definition of normal. So these are the guys I follow. You know, my dream, my goal is to own the Cleveland Indians. A lot of people know that. And I tuned into Grant Cardone one day and I heard they own $350 million in real estate. And I said to myself, that would be a great down payment on the Cleveland Indians. Interesting. So I started studying his beliefs and his habits and his business because that takes me out of what's normal for me and gets me to think what's normal for him. And that will propel me toward my end goal of owning the Cleveland Indians. And I like to study Robert Herjavec. Robert Herjavec is worth between 100 and 200 million dollars. He owns a private yacht and it's all in business investment. So he has a very keen eye being on Shark Tank of seeing what has impacted companies and what hasn't. So I follow these guys in order to change my view of normal. I recently became acquaintances with Jeff Hoffman. He's one of the founders of Priceline.com and the idea of taking an idea and putting it in, building a multi billion dollar company out of it is stretches me out of my normal and gets me to have different thoughts. And if he asks me a question from his definition of normal, it makes me think at a different level than I've had to before. And I love to follow Gary Vaynerchuk because Gary Vaynerchuk's goal is to own the New York Jets. And so he's on a certain path and thinking about certain things that I want to be thinking about because he's a few years ahead of me where I want to be on my path to own the Cleveland Indians.

So I decided to just build my network and build my definition of normal by getting all these guys into a room. I have been looking for a long time for a group that would help me stretch my ideo normal. And I joined a mastermind. It was actually Ryan Deiss's mastermind five or six years ago. And it completely shattered my paradigms. It made me very uncomfortable for the first year, but it stretched my idea of normal. And since I haven't found a group like that again, I just decided to put it together. And I invited all of these individuals and some of my personal mentors and other industry leaders to our year end event called Freedom Fast Lane Live. You know that your definition of normal is holding you back and you want to radically shatter that by hearing from and meeting people who are thinking at a normal far beyond yours. And then take that and use it to fuel the exponential growth of your business, your happiness, the trajectory that you're on, the network that you're building. I'd like to invite you to join us at our year end event. It's called Freedom Fast Lane Live and it's in Austin, Texas, December 11th, 12th and 13th. And the link to see all of the speakers and to sign up for Freedom Fastlane live is at freedomfastlanelive.com if nothing else, I want you to take away this and realize this, that your actions and your results are in perfect alignment with what you perceive as normal. And that's BS in the first place. So if you want different results, change your perception by up leveling your inputs and your associations. And that is the fastest way to kind of biohack your success. Thank you for watching. My name is Ryan Daniel Moran. My website is freedomfastlane.com you can find me on itunes and on our podcast called Freedom Fastlane. And we'd love to have you in Austin, Texas. You can get tickets@freedomfastlanelive.com Hope to see you there this December. And thanks for watching. Take care.