The Top Traits Of Successful People - PLUS A 7-Figure Lifestyle Case Study | #FFLTV 13

Oh, hey, fastlaners. My name is Ryan Daniel Moran and on today's episode, we're going to talk about the evils of capitalism. We'll talk about the barriers that prevent people from starting businesses. We'll look at what personality traits make people successful and we'll look at a million dollar lifestyle brand. Make this intro great again. I find it offensive in 2017 that we use Trumpisms as the intro for freedom fast and that you have all these tribe members who are making all this money while the 1% suffers.

So earlier this month, I was with a family member and with my daughter Esther, and my family member was playing with my little girl and we were just having a conversation because of the new administration. I don't know if you guys heard, but there's a new president and it was a big deal here in America, at least here in Texas. And my family member and I were talking politics and she said, you know, I don't know that I really like capitalism. And this is the point where I said, do you know what I do for a living? And she said, yeah, you run businesses. And I said, do you know that I run capitalism.com? and there was an awkward silence. But what it did is it opened up a really great conversation of really why I started capitalism.com in the first place. Because here I was with someone that I trust, someone that I respect and even admire, and she was sharing her perception of capitalism, which is the exact reason why I felt the need to shift the conversation. Because my generation seems to have this view that there's the evil 1% that get rich and successful on the backs of everyone else and that they need to be either paying their fair share or they need to be giving back. There's two things that I want to hit here that I think most people miss when they're exploring the tenets of capitalism or the evils of capitalism. The first is that what is your alternative? The alternative to freedom is force free. Enforced by government is always more dangerous, always creates more exploitation, always creates more inequality than does freedom. Because freedom is simply voluntary exchange. And when there is voluntary exchange, there is a creation of new wealth. If I create something new and you want it, we have created new value. That's why there is no fixed pie. There is an unlimited pie. You can have as much pie as you want you and it does not limit the amount of pie that I can have. So the idea of fair share is a misnomer, which is like a misnomer. It's a misnomer because there is no fixed amount. So a fair amount is what we can produce as much as possible. That's the beauty of freedom. That is the beauty of capitalism. It's why we teach entrepreneurship, because when someone comes in and they create value for themselves, they have all also created value for someone else. It's new value, not just taking from somebody else. Which brings me to my second point. The idea that there should be giving back, or those who are at the top did it only by exploitation. The point here is that by, if we assume that there's voluntary exchange, that means in order to get to the proverbial top, that means that there had to be an immense amount of value creation in the first place. There had to be a provision of value to many other people in order to get to that position. So the idea of giving back or paying your fair share, that already happened. It happened on the way to the top. You created new value for somebody else. That's how you got there. You have been rewarded for providing something into the marketplace. That's how they got there, by creating the value that other people now get to enjoy. So giving back is fine if that's what you want to do, but you have already paid your tab by actually creating the value in the first place. This isn't what people are talking about. People just like to make comparisons. And it's rational because our brains only know how to do that. Our brains look at inequality and it says, there's this person here and this person here. This is a problem. All our brains know how to do is compare what is hot, what is cold, what's beautiful, what is ugly. Whatever you're comparing it to, what's successful, what's a failure, whatever you're comparing it to, it's why those who chant we are the 99% forget the fact that they're actually in the 1% of the world's wealth. Because if you make, what is it, $28,000 a year, you're in the world's top 1% of wealth. But when you don't see that on a regular basis, your comparison is a little bit different. When capitalism has been experimented, when freedom has been experimented, it has only worked every time. And when exploitation or fascism or socialism is experimented with, we all see how that ends. Capitalism is the best shot that we have at solving the world's problems. Government is a way of protecting the freedoms that allow you to enjoy more goods and services, to enjoy unlimited upward mobility, and to enjoy the creation of solutions to new problems. Because profitability is. Is the greatest measure of progress. That is why capitalism and entrepreneurship is so important. That's why we talk about building businesses and investing in profits. So let's answer some questions that will help you do just that.

Nick Bonesteel asks, what personality traits have been key to your success?

You may have heard me talk about that. There was actually a study done in children that evaluated if they could find predictable personality traits that would determine success. You might have heard this called the marshmallow test. You give a kid a marshmallow, you see if they eat the marshmallow or if they hold onto the marshmallow when given an incentive to do so. And what this test supposedly showed was that the ability to delay gratification was the greatest predictor of success in children. The children who came back with the marshmallow and said, I'll have my second marshmallow, please, were the individuals who grew up to be more successful than the rest of the group. So being able to delay gratification and do the hard stuff now, even when you don't want to do it, is a personality trait of mine that I think has made me successful even as a kid. I remember, oh, this is embarrassing to admit on camera, but I remember being at a Pizza Hut when I was 6 or 7 years old. This is when people went to pizza shops and ate inside. It was a crazy, archaic time in our history. And we went into Pizza Hut and there was an arcade game at this Pizza Hut. And my dad gave me 50 cents and he said, you want to play the arcade game? And he gave me the 50 cents, and I immediately started weeping. And I was asked, why are you crying? And I said, I want to save it.

Even as a kid, I wanted to save my 50 cents and not play the video games.

When I was at home, my mom was afraid that my brother and I were going to play too many video games. When we got a Nintendo nes, it was a breakthrough at the time. And my dad had this idea of he would make tokens and he'd give them to us and we'd spent. Each token was worth half an hour, and half an hour we'd get to play video games. And when we spent the tokens at the end of the week, then he'd give it back to us and we would use them again. I wouldn't spend the tokens, I would save them. And my dad had to go make more tokens because I started hoarding all of the tokens in the house to save for later. There's something in my wiring that says delayed gratification brings a better tomorrow. Sacrificing today is good for tomorrow because of that. That is the reason why I've been able to build businesses. Because I'm okay not taking money off the table. I'm okay reinvesting for the next thing. I'm okay learning the thing that's painful to learn because I know it will give me a better payday. Now, today I'm more in a mode of I want to enjoy today, I want to do what I enjoy. I want to enjoy my life now. But I always plan for the long term. This is a trait. And Gary Vaynerchuk has been talking about this a lot on his videos and I could not agree more. The idea of the person who can plan for the longest term usually is the most successful because there are exponential returns to investments, not just investments in the stock market or real estate. I mean investments in your time, investments in your education. There are exponential effects. So you're getting.01%, then 2, then 4, then 8, 16. And then it starts to take off. So if you take money off the table when you're here, you're never going to hit that exponential uptick. It's that exponential return that is what creates the standout overnight successes that have been at this for 10 years. So the ability to delay gratification and therefore playing for the very long term were probably the pieces that have made me the most successful. Most recently, me. Doubling down on my strengths, being able to forgive my flaws, be cool with my flaws, and focus on the activities and the habits that make me happy and that I actually enjoy are the things that have really been able to give me that exponential uptick and is why some people look at me now and say, you came out of nowhere. That came from me. Doubling down on where I'm strong and forget trying to do things that I hate and do things that I'm not good at and allow me to be in that mode where I am my best, where I derive the most value, and allowing other people to do the same and going in a very specific direction together. And that's the final piece. This isn't so much of a personality trait as much as it is a habit that I have had to learn. And that is incrementally getting clearer and clearer about where we are going, what we are building and why we are doing it. The more I get abundantly clear about our goals and expectations, the more the right people get in line to be able to build that. And then there's better people, there's better Customers, those of you who are watching know that the clearer that we are about where we're going and why we do this, the more likely you are to watch the next video or download the next podcast. Podcast. Download them all, by the way. And that is why people start to have really started to rally around what we're doing@capitalism.com as we get clearer and clearer about what we are doing and why we're here. So the clearer you can be and the longer term you can plan, the more successful I believe that you will be.

Hannah Lamumi asks, what barriers have you seen that prevent people from starting a business?

Ah, this is a great question. Because there are so many people with ideas in their brain. There are so many people who with things that they want to do. What is it that stands in their way from actually building the business? I think without question, the biggest barrier is just being willing to ask for the darn sale. I mean, the person who actually puts it out there and gets feedback in the marketplace, the person who actually is willing to look stupid. Because you don't look stupid. You just think you are because you're in your own head. Look, we have so many abilities to be able to take orders today. You can put up a Kickstarter and not even have the product done and take an order. You can pre sale products. You could talk about a product on Facebook and get people rallying behind it that are just your friends and co workers that believe in what you want to do. You can pull out your phone and have it go viral. You can put something on Amazon and it costs 30 bucks to set up an account. There is more opportunity now for you to be funded, for you to have a prototype, for you to pre sell your product, for you to get it out there than ever before. The difference is who's a person that's willing to make mistakes along the way and say, I'm asking for the darn sale. Whether it is emailing your customer list or pitching the client or picking up the phone and saying, if I could provide this value, would you be willing to pay for it? We all have our own insecurities, but when it comes to entrepreneurship, I have found that the biggest insecurity that prevents people from taking that action is what if I can't deliver? Or what if I'm not of value? What if my product's not good enough? So we sit there tweaking and testing and polishing something that we haven't even got real feedback on. Ask your market what it wants, give them that, get feedback and adjust. You can do it profitably if you're just willing to ask for the sale. The second thing that I think is kind of a barrier to business is some sort of distribution. There's a perception of a lack of distribution. And I think we can hack this a little bit. I call it audience building. If you do nothing more than pulling out your phone, talking about your product, showing a demo of your product, advertising that product with like a hundred bucks as a boosted Facebook post, which wouldn't be ideal, but it would be something we would get at least a few thousand views on something like that. And then we sent them to a page that collected an email address that said get notified when it's ready. If we did only that, we would have a list of people who are talking about the product, who are on a list that were ready for it when it got live. That's a distribution model. It's not a very sophisticated one, but it's the shortest one to actually taking the sale. Or it might be you then put up the Kickstarter page and you send your list to the Kickstarter or it's you making a few videos using the demo, putting it on YouTube and when the product is ready, talking about it on the YouTube audience that has started to follow your videos. So what is your distribution model for getting a product out there? For some people, it's Amazon listings and then ranking them for keywords. But is there a way that you can control a bit of the conversation so that when it's ready to launch a product or a second product, you can pull a lever and get it out there? If this is new to you, go watch the first episode of Freedom Fastlane tv where someone asked the question, how would you start a business on $500 a month or less? And I say every dime of that needs to go into audience building. Because when it is time for you to monetize, you can pull a lever, have people see a message, and you can sell whatever you want at and have a profitable business.

This is the part of the show where we look at one of our students businesses and we find out what they're doing well and what they could be doing to make even more money. For this one, I thought it would be fun if we brought in some of our tribe members here in person. So let's see if this still works. Can we manifest a tribe member, Someone who's doing over a million dollars? Bring in the tribe member.

Whoa. Oh, man. That continues to work. That is amazing. And we got the Cohen's Here. What's up guys? Welcome to Freedom. Fast lane tv.

Ryan, where are we? I was just working on my computer.

That is the law of attraction at work right there. So you guys run Lifestyle Dynamics. You guys are doing great. Doing 150,000amonth. Great. You guys are right at that 2 million dollar mark, which is awesome. So tell me a little bit about the business and where you guys are looking to go and what you're running into along the way.

Take it away, Chels.

Well, we have a second brand that we've started and that brand is one of the brands that we are going to be focusing on primarily. Okay, so we've got the. The first brand is really our cash flow brand. This brand is our long term, long play brand that we really want to push outside of Amazon.

And is that because your passion is in that second brand or is that because you just see diminishing returns in the million dollar business? What makes you want to step away from a business that's selling over a million dollars a year and start something that is at zero? What makes you want to do that?

Multiple reasons. The first reason was the diminishing returns. So we met with you last year and we had a kind of pivot where Lifestyle Dynamics was doing well and it was growing. But the.

Lifespan of that brand is not going to be, I mean, realistically. Right. I mean these are me too type products. They're good products but we wanted to start selling.

Got it. So you don't really want that to be the focus of your time. It served its purpose and now it's time to build something that's really meaningful to you, that you really want to spend your time and energy building. And then you want to either automate Lifestyle Dynamics or sell it so you can put all of your energy into the new thing. Okay, so tell me a little bit about what the challenge is on the new brand. Or we could talk about growing Lifestyle Dynamics. What would be a good use of your time?

We're more interested in learning what the best strategies are for mostly focusing on the new brand. And the, the biggest issue that I think we're having is that I am a huge bottleneck in our business. So I need to figure out how to not be a bottleneck and at the same time be able to enjoy life and not go crazy.

Great. So where are you spending the majority of your time right now? That is just demoralizing and taking up all of your energy to where the time you're done, you're like, alright, what am I doing with My life and my career. What are some of those activities right now?

Finances.

Finances. Yeah, finances. And I have outsourced some of the finances, but it's not nearly enough for what I'm paying the company. But finances is a big part of it. And the other part is.

Could I ask, what does finances mean? Does that mean managing books?

Managing books.

You know, paying bills.

Paying bills. Payroll taxes.

Taxes take a lot of time up. She's really good at it too. So she.

Sales tax. So first things first, I have some great resources that I'll recommend off camera for automating that that are affordable publicly. Bench co does an okay job and I have some people that I've worked with personally for a long time that I can make recommendations for. So what are the other things that when you're trying to grow the business that are just sucking you dry?

I think feeling like I have to do everything and that I'm not outsourcing enough. Like I gotta have to do all the blogging and then I have to learn. I'm learning. Click funnels now and then I want, you know, email marketing. I'm not getting enough out on email marketing. I feel like there's all of these opportunities that I'm missing because I'm trying to do all of it.

Got it. So it's kind of.

It's also kind of a transition. Like for me, I'm sort of the opposite of Chelsea where I want to outsource everything and I don't want to do anything.

So it, you know, I have no problem outsourcing it. But then there's only so many dollars, right? And we have to survive off the income as well.

I totally get it. So I think I have a nice samurai for this one. And if this doesn't help you out, we'll go deeper. But a funny thing happens with entrepreneurs, especially entrepreneurs who have a success under their belt once they have this success now they say, well, I know how to do that. This is normalized to me. So I'm gonna go learn a completely different skill set that isn't what made me successful in the first place. So this thing works. I know that, yeah, it's all great. Let's learn a completely new set of skills and spend all of our time being noobs again, starting all over and building the business completely differently than what worked for us in the past. So here's a question. When you are building this new brand, can you use the exact same skill sets? Putting things on Amazon, optimizing your listing, your a thought leader on Optimizing listings. And you are amazing in front of the camera. You know how to build audiences. You've seen what Maruusha has done with her new brand. You're following a kind of a similar model. So you have a bit of a following that's starting to build. Can you only focus on audience building, optimizing listings, getting reviews and getting this business to be profitable and then worrying about email marketing and all these other things that aren't in your core skill set?

Yeah, I think so. I guess the. When I think of email marketing, I feel like I should have that email marketing piece as part of the building the audience, but I don't feel like. And we've got a list from our previous business and we're going to be working on setting up a click opt in to get the list from one business to the other.

Yeah, great.

But if I'm not marketing to that list, then what's the point, you know?

Yeah, I totally get it. And you can and should be marketing to that list. And I'm guessing you could be marketing to that list if you weren't worried about all of these other things that are keeping you bogged down. So I guess my question is you're building up a good audience. You have products that you both are proud of. You've got videos that are being shared that have a heartfelt message to them. You've got a list that you can market to. You know enough about email marketing to be able to do some damage. And so what is preventing you from really going aggressively into this new brand and stripping away the things that don't provide revenue Right now?

My answer is nothing. We are going aggressively this year. So we've already. We have business planned it out, we have the products lined up and we are making strides in that direction. So that's my viewpoint and we work together as best we can to do that.

Can you pull that lever now? Like, can you promote those products right now?

Yeah, and I think that, you know, he says nothing, but at the same time, I know that I've got this mental block. There's a website that we have that's generating a lot of. That's generating traffic about, you know, 200 per day. It's building our list, but there's no conversion there. So we've got the problem of a website that's building a list but nothing else. And then a web. And then we want that to be happening over here. So there's content. Like we have to put content out so we can keep building that list.

I've got to keep doing the thing that's not working so I can get it to work rather than focusing on the thing that's working really, really well so I can make more money. I mean, this is, this is, I'm not picking on you guys. This is very, very common. And here's, here's what. Something that we've done internally that has helped us. Rather than try to manage all of these different pieces at once, we make a deal internally that we're gonna to four of them for three months now. We're not allowed to learn anything new or focus on anything else except for those two to four items for three months. And at the end of three months, we can decide a new set of things that we're gonna focus on. So we have to say, if I'm gonna keep blogging, I have got to replace something else on that list of three things that are gonna be the focus of my time. And what you'll find is that you will double down on the things that are working really well and you will naturally have to make the hard decision of, we're not gonna do this now, we can do it later, we can make this a focus later, but we're not gonna do it now. Cause this is the thing that we're gonna focus on learning and really improving. And when you give yourself three months to do that, you're not waking up every morning and going, I gotta get this done and I gotta get this done and I gotta get this done. And they've ended up feeling completely exhausted and like you made absolutely zero progress. Now for you, that's probably gonna be building the audience, writing an email to the existing list to promote the new products, getting new reviews, and maybe sourcing new products for the new brand. And if you focus on only that for three months and at the end you say what this really needs is content. Well, the good news is you've got momentum now and you could theoretically then hire that out and make that the focus of the next three months. We're gonna find a really good person in the next three months, is gonna take over content that knows what they're doing and let them do it for three months before we evaluate the result. And what you'll find is that by simplifying things, you actually move faster rather than slower.

That's great.

Awesome. How's that?

Yeah.

Well, you guys are doing a great job. Congratulations on the multi million dollar business. And I'm so, I'm just gonna. Yeah, go for it. I guess I took you away from the coffee at your other computer. So congratulations on what you're doing. I'm so excited I've told you this. I'll say it publicly. The minute you guys need an investor, call Uncle Ryan, because I love what you'll do in your new brand. Cool. Thanks guys. Thanks for coming on Freedom Fast Lane tv.

Alright, Ryan, thank you.

If you find yourself in a similar situation as Ari and Chelsea where you are working more and more than ever and you're having a hard time prioritizing what do I actually need to get done so that I move the ball forward. There's a podcast on the Freedom Fast Lane podcast that it's an interview with my buddy Sean Coyne who is the best that I know of managing multiple projects at the same time. So if you just Google Sean Coyne Freedom Fastlane or you just go to freedomfastlane.com iTunes and you listen to his episode about managing multiple projects. I think this will show you how you can prioritize which things need to get done so that you can move the ball forward. And if you want to run a business like Ari and Chelsea do, where they sell physical products, they built a million dollar brand and now they are pivoting into doing the thing that they really want to be doing in the world, head over to freedomfastlane.com bootcamp. That is our bootcamp that shows you exactly how to pick products, source products and start selling them so that you can be on the the route to building a business and investing the profits. You know, it has been so rewarding to work with people like Ari and Chelsea who you met earlier and watching their businesses grow. When we met, they were doing a fraction of what they are doing now. And now they're at a point where they can start a second business and it be something they're really, really excited about almost being like their gift to the world, the thing that they are producing that makes somebody's lives better. And that's why I get so jizzard jazzered up about entrepreneurship and capitalism because it literally is producing something, it's creating something. And that makes your life better. It makes the customers that you interact with better, it makes the world a better place. It's why we can look back 150 years ago and say, wow, we have a really different world. We have all this new stuff. It's because we're creating value as we create businesses and create wealth. And it is an honor and a privilege to serve the tribe and and those of you who are just starting your businesses as well as our Backroom members, people who are doing well over a million dollars and people who are selling businesses for $10 million and up. It's such an honor to be able to watch your evolution. I think entrepreneurship is probably the greatest portal we have to self discovery because it requires you to put yourself and something you care about out there. So that is why I think this message is so important. If you want to start a business like these, we can help you do that. If you have a successful business that you want to scale, join our tribe@freedomfastslane.com Tribe if you are already doing over a million dollars, we have a special group just for people who are millionaire entrepreneurs and investors and that is called the Backroom and you can find out more about that@freedompasssign.com it's an honor to be able to talk about this. Thank you for supporting this platform and supporting the show. We'll see you guys on the next episode.

Sam.