Daniel Steinberg is Built to Lead

And I remember seeing you do an event and you were really funny, you know, so you had this talent.

Yeah.

But you said you at some point realized, this is not going to be what's going to be fulfilling me and my magnum opus.

Yeah. So it took a while to get there. I mean, I'm almost 50, and it's scary because you want to plant your flag somewhere and you think, okay, this is where I'm planting it. And then, you know, two years later, three years later, you're like, that's still not it. Still not it. And you keep on moving around and you're like, when is it going to stay? When is it going to be in that one place? And I think it's in that one place now, I'm pretty sure.

So that's awesome. And I want to get to that. But I want to talk real quick.

About.

The struggle of what you went through when you wrote the book.

I took communications in college. Television, radio, and advertising was really my thing. I love the idea of. Of encapsulating the selling point of something, whatever it is, for your company. It was the authenticity. It was the heart of the collection agency, and I love that. I always loved capturing the essence of something and being able to take it and shape it and present it to the world in a new light that it hadn't seen before. So when. When I left the not for profit world, where I was a Jewish educator for many years, the most intuitive thing to me was to go into advertising. Marketing, to try to use that talent of mine. And so I had no idea about sales. It was just like, oh, let's just hang out a shingle and say, we're in business. And I had no idea how that was. I must have been an idiot. And it was the tail end of the recession, and it was. I mean, video was starting to get big, but people weren't really spending money on things like that at the time. At least people I had access to. And so I had to take some sales training, and I took the Sandler sales system of training, which was very aggressive, very assertive for my personality. And it had me doing cold calls and cold meetings and asking for one call closes. I remember you bristled at that when.

We were meeting, because I never did that.

I know I said, you can't think about it. You have to tell me yes or no. Totally push back on that. But to me, it was the hardest time of my life. I mean, besides the fact doing sales and needing money is a bad mix, you don't want to go into a sales call, desperate for the sale. And I was feeling all that. I was so raw. I was doing things that were so outside my comfort zone, no idea what I was doing. And I was so far in. I couldn't scale back at that point and try to reorient. I was just figured, I just have to make this work somehow. And it was so raw. And I ended up writing a book from my experiences where I basically bought it out. And I realized that I had become so scarce and I had let so much of my need for money shape how I interacted with people, even my own family, and it was just really bad. And then when I said, I won't do this anymore, things actually started to develop in a positive way. I started to become healthier physically, emotionally. Opportunities started to pop up that I couldn't. That I probably was squeezing away before because of my. I met the sales guy. He told me, he said, you have commission breath. That's what he said. Said, you know, it's like you can smell it on a salesperson. You know, it's a. They need the sale. I just felt very needy, and I thought I was being a good salesperson, but it was so. So the story that I wrote about was a guy who. He was a Sandler graduate that I asked him for some help with on something, and he just blasted me about how I had no conviction in what I did. It was just hard. It was just a comedy error. And I look back on it now in comedy, what they call. There's a formula for comedy, and it's tragedy plus time equals comedy. So that was a very tragic time. That was about 12, 13 years ago. Now it's kind of funny to laugh at. Now I can laugh at it. But at the time, it was awful. I mean, I'd leave the house every morning, beaten before even hit the street. And it just seemed endless. And I didn't know how it was going to ever end. And then had a couple good years. And you know how it is. Feast and famine, self employment. You hope.

So what was it like talking to people in my company who were employees? You also saw my journey, and you were very close to my journey. So you knew what I was doing and what I was shooting at. So you were seeing other people as you were trying to figure out your builder's journey? You saw all these other people trying to write their magnum opus. You saw people sharing it.

Yeah.

Was that easier? Did that make things harder? Just give me your thoughts on just the experience of going kind of going Through a program where we were trying to figure that out.

I love being involved in was the highlight of my week. It was when I was there, even if I wouldn't speak up, just being in the room opened something in me and made me feel differently and think differently. And it would spill over to the rest of the week. And there were times that I didn't speak up or do any of the exercises. But. But just being in that growth environment and seeing people able to share, people calling each other out in a safe environment where it wouldn't be held against them at work, I thought was so real and genuine and so necessary. I mean, people don't usually have that safe space where they can do that. And I saw that how it bonded people, how the team became so cohesive as a result of that. It was amazing to me. And that was, I think, right after that time period that I described earlier. And it was very healing to me. It was great to see people not having it all figured out, working through it with each other. That spirit of camaraderie and lifting each other up and helping each other and wanting to be there for each other. It was amazing. Never forget that time.

That's interesting. So what would you say would be one of your biggest takeaways from your experience, kind of going through that program with us and being part of the team and coming in as a visitor and telling your story and then being one of one of us? Like, you were, like, merging with our team. But there were a lot of. A lot of things learned in Built Elite. And we cover lots of content, and we talk about worldview and principles and big visions, and then we talk about whatever the group wants to go or that wherever we want to go. But what's something maybe you can kind of just share that, like, maybe either stands out or that you took away from it, that you feel like you really adapted in your life?

I'll tell you one thing that sticks in my mind, and I think this is from one of the videos that we did together, which is Alicia. Alicia. She said, before, Built to Lead, I was sleepwalking through life. I was sleepwalking, and I didn't really understand at the time, but the more that I proceed through life, I realized the autopilot, that type of. Well, that's what everybody else is doing. And I'm caught up in this. And so that seems to be the right thing to do next. And you just kind of. You're sleepwalking. You're not really awake and present. And I think that that was Something that Built to Lead really gave me is that be awake, be intentional, be present, be purposeful about what you're doing, and make sure that you can explain it, not just other people, but also to yourself.

It's funny because one of the purposes of Build Lead is to wake people up.

Yeah.

It's the jolt people.

Yeah, right. Yeah. And Chet was great at that. You were great at that. And I saw how you'd interview people when they come in and they walk out with it wearing a tie when they came in, and, like, you know, pull down four buttons.

It's hard to get to the root of who someone really is and Build To Lead. What we try to do is we try to get to the root of, like, who are you? And the problem is, again, I say it because it's. It is one of the hardest things to do is to know who you are. In fact, one of the pieces of Built to Lead is the identity piece. And I, for probably a decade, really was writing things out about, oh, I'm a son, I'm a brother, I'm a friend. But I didn't really know who I was until I realized, wow, like, I used to be this athlete. I'm not an athlete anymore. And I was an entrepreneur. And then all of a sudden, like, I sold my business, like, who am I?

Who's the real you?

And it led. For me, it led a big part of my life, which is my faith. And when I used to think about your experience with our company, the one thing that stands out to me is I remember how calm you were. Almost. Almost like scary calm when you were going through really hard times, trying to figure things out, and you were. You were very patient. And I remember thinking and saying to you, like, well, what are you doing now? And I remember one time you told me, you're going to take some time and you're going to pause.

Yeah.

And I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, like, there's no way I'd be able to do that. How can you do that? And you're dove deep into faith and your learning, and just really, it felt to me like you were trying to find yourself still or reinvent yourself into, like, figuring out what you wanted to do.

Right. Yeah. That's accurate. I mean, what looks like calm on the outside is not always calm on the inside. But patient maybe is accurate. And that's a gift from that harrowing, difficult, scarce experience where I didn't have any money. I didn't know when the next money was coming in. And I lived like that for a long time. And it taught me there's two worlds you can live in. There's the world of scarcity and there's the world of abundance. And it really doesn't matter how much money you have. People are very wealthy and very scarce. We saw the story about the founder of ikea. He was a multi billionaire, I think, and he used to recycle tea bags, gift wrapping, things like that. He was the cheapest guy on the planet. And so what's all that money worth if you can't appreciate it? And by the same token, there are people that don't have money that are beyond happy. We know these types of people in hovels in the back alleys of Jerusalem that are just serene in all different places in the world. So the gift of not having money for an extended period of time and seeing that I was still okay and that I'd be okay, that gave me that gift of that long term vision that it's going to be okay that I have. I'm always supported, I'm always cared for. Things have a way of opening up. So I remember someone saying to me that like when I decided one of my iterations, when I thought I was going to go out on the road and do some stand up comedy and I didn't really have much savings at all and someone said I wouldn't have the stomach to do that. I don't have. You have. And I said that was after you go through what I went through. It doesn't scare you anymore. That's one of those Jeff Bridges in that movie Fearless where he almost dies and then he doesn't have that fear of dying anymore because he came all the way to the edge and you saw that you were okay. So that's the gift. And I constantly have to remind my wife about that. When we go through a period where we're not sure where the next paycheck is going to come from or something. We went through that once before. If there's any lesson that we took from that is that it's going to be okay.