2019 - A Year in Review

If you build it, they will not come. Without marketing. If you build it, they will not come. That's a line from Kevin Costner's movie, A Field of Dreams. Welcome to the Dean Graziosi show. All success starts right here. What's up? Welcome to this very special podcast where we're going to recap 2019. I am here with my amazing wife, Lisa. What's up, babe?

Hey. Hi, guys. You know, be 2020 coming up soon.

Yeah, really soon. In fact, when you're listening this, it may already be 2020. We figured we'd go back over the year and talk about the wins and talk about the things that didn't go so well. In fact, some of the things that failed. So maybe in your own life you can realize it is a roller coaster. It is the. The ups and the downs and all of that equal the success you're looking for. So we're so excited. What about you, babe? How was your 2019?

I think it's been the busiest year of my entire life. Like, it's been. More big events have happened this year for me personally than I think that will ever happen for the rest of my life. Because we literally had so much go on. Like, we got engaged, we got married in another country. We had. We were having a ba. I mean, I'm. We're having a baby next year, but we got pregnant this year.

But we moved in a new house.

Moved into a new house, moved into.

A new office, moved out of our.

Old houses, moved out of our old businesses, merged our families. Merged our families. Yeah. We have built your salon, the salon.

Built our new office here. Your new book, the Journal KBB was this year.

The kbb. Wow. I wonder if next year will be boring.

No, no. It always builds momentum. Next year's gonna be busier.

Exactly. Exactly.

So. So we did have a lot going on. Oh, my God. You listed so much. We got engaged. New office, new hires. We hired 60 new people. Yes. You got pregnant. The Journal, our Facebook groups. So many great things. But I figured we'd talk about some of that good. And then we talk about some of the things that didn't go so good. Because I think in a year end review, which I think everybody should do, so maybe this would be a good example for you guys, is we should look back upon the year and take what serves us right. We had things go great for us this year. I mean, amazing. And what never happens is you just take it for granted, say, oh, good things happen. Next year will be good, too. That's not the Way it works. Like, when you see somebody.

That's true.

It looks like they're evolving year after year. It's because you got to take what serves you from the year before, compound it. Put more energy, more effort, do more of it. But you also have to do the complete opposite. You have to look what didn't work well in the previous year and stop doing it and cut it out or eliminate it completely for your life. So I think we should start off with some of the things that worked really well, mostly in business, but we'll talk a little bit personal, because how can I not talk about marrying the love of my life?

Baby.

And being engaged. That was amazing. We got engaged in Cabo and married in Italy. And though both of those were completely, like, fairy tale stuff, and that was fairy tale. Because I'm 50. Because we're in love. Yeah, we're massively in love. But plus, I'm 50. I've learned so much. Lisa, she's learned so much about life. And we work on personal growth. So by the time we met each other, we knew it was love. We didn't screw around. We worked on both being a better version of ourselves.

We still work on that every day.

Every single day. And I don't think either one of us take it for granted, even a little bit.

Yeah, no.

We found something great, and we're not gonna tarnish it. So our love was amazing. But though that's the most fantastic thing, and we truly do fall more in love every single day because we work at it. We don't take it for granted. I think one of the biggest things, a massive win before we get into business stuff, was that we merged our families really well.

Absolutely. And that didn't just happen. Like, I know that's, you know, from an outsider or outside view, it looks like it just, oh, you guys got lucky. But we actually worked really hard on it. And even way before we merged our families.

Yeah. We did a year of counseling before.

And talking every single day about it in depth and every single scenario possible. We did discuss it, and we discussed our fears and. And what we each want. Very openly transparent and very honest, and.

We created a compelling future, which you need to do in every part of life. Right. So we didn't leave it up to chance. And I think that's a really great example for every area of your life. If you. I was literally just talking to a dear friend of mine, Patrick Gantempo, this morning. I haven't talked to him in ages. And he asked me everything that was going on in my life. I haven't talked to him a while, and I told him everything. I said, hands down, though, it took all that away. This year, we merged our families successfully. Right? What could be more important than that? Your family. I love your family. Your parents, your brothers, your sisters. My kids love you. Your parents love my kids. We all, like, they have a great relationship with their mom separately, like, everybody just merged together, and it's magical. So. But with that, and Lisa hit the nail on the head. It didn't happen by accident. I went to therapy almost once a week for a whole year. Lisa joined me on majority of those. We read books, we interviewed people who did it successfully. We also talked to people who failed. I mean, self education is the number one thing I'm always promoting. We did that. We paid for knowledge of people that know how to blend families.

And it helps with my profession. Speaking with clients who come from a blended family or even speaking to younger kids that are clients of mine that come without their parents. And I would just ask them questions like, so tell me how this situation is working for you or how it didn't work for you. And literally, I compounded all that information and I made up what I wanted to be my future on my own, my own opinions. I didn't let anyone make up my opinion for me.

Because if you realize success without home life, happiness without fulfillment is emptiness, it might be the biggest form of failure. And. And you guys probably know this if you're listening or watching, including myself, I came from a divorced family that went completely bonkers. Like, my family, a lot of them can't be in the same room. My mom and dad still don't want to be in the same room. And this is. They've been divorced for 48 years, right?

And the only person, the only people it hurts are the kids. You know what I mean? So it's like, if you really say you love your kids, well, then, you know, be the bigger person and make an effort to, you know, change things.

Figure out a way to do it.

Yeah, figure out a way. Even though inside, sometimes you have to bottle it up inside and be the bigger person. But really, your kids come first.

So if you think about that, I didn't mean to go so deep on this, babe, but think about this. If you're listening right now, if you think about why that worked, and we're gonna get to business stuff here. We're taking a little longer. If you think why that worked is we knew where we wanted to go. The end result was we wanted all our family together without stress. We wanted the ability that when my kids are at their mom's house, she's not talking bad about us, and when the kids are with us, we're not talking bad about. None of that happens. Not even a, a fraction of that happens. But we thought about that in advance. So we had a compelling future on where we wanted to be a blended family without stress. Just being blended enough is enough stress. Now that we had our compelling future, we went and got self education, we hired consultants, we read books, we interviewed people, and then we took massive action. We didn't just hope it would happen. We listened. Her and I talked openly, we talked to the kids openly. And when you merge all that together and you take. There was zero, zero possibility that we weren't gonna allow make this happen. Great. Because our kids, you said it best, babe. Our kids, my kids that are now ours, they deserve that. So we did the same things I do in every area of my life where I want to be successful, right?

And life's not perfect. And you know, a lot of people are probably saying, well, my situation is different. I know and trust me, there's some things that, that frustrate us, that frustrate us and are not perfect and we wish could be different. But also pick your battles, you know, and also, you know, there's worse things in life to worry about.

Here's what I know, and I see this in a lot of people as the last piece. I'll go, if you've gone through a divorce, if you've gone through a separation, if there's lots of animosity, anger, and it's a lot of times it might not be your fault. You might be the one trying to step up and be the bigger person and the other person doesn't allow you. At the end of our lives, I still believe, and this is the message I told you all the time, at the end of our lives, I look back, I feel we're going to look back at 100 years old and you're not going to say to yourself, I'm glad I stayed firm, they screwed me over. And like, I don't think that you're going to say, I wish I just forgave them. I wish I just forgot about that. I know they cheated on me, they left me, they stole my money, they were rude, they did something behind my back. But at the end of the day, it's us that will suffer, it's your kids that will suffer. And I just feel if you can put purge that and focus On a bigger solution, anything is possible. Believe me. That's where we are. So I didn't mean to go so deep on that, but it's the same ingredients for every bit of success.

Exactly.

So our.

For friendships, for everything.

You know, our family's merging went great. We moved into our new house that we feel completely blessed about. We got married in Italy, which was the best, best, best, best. Amazing trip. Ethan, you can confirm that Ethan, behind the camera also came to the wedding. It was pretty spectacular. We got lucky on that one because we never had gone there before. We booked it from here. We went and we just had amazing Italian people take great care of us. And it was like a fairy tale.

It was really magical. It was the best vacation, best trip of my life.

So then we had. We're talking about the good stuff, right? So that went great then. Tony Robbins and I have been friends for over 10 years. We've been. We decided not to be partners forever because so many people, I mean, I thought people wanted to partner with me until I watched how many people want to partner with Tony. And it's like everybody and their brother. I'm like, you know, I just love this guy. We have this amazing relationship. Our friendship kept getting deeper and deeper. I'm like, let's not do business.

Yeah, I get that.

But impacting people's lives through self education has been our world for 60 years between the two of us. And a couple years ago, you remember when we were in Idaho, when we made that decision, Tony and I went out golfing for a few hours. You stayed back with Sage, his wife. And we got back and decided, we're going to do this. We're going to make self education the new norm. And we worked really hard and took. We condensed decades in the days, as Tony said, Our 60 years experience, we condensed it into a course called the knowledge broker blueprint, KBB. We launched it to the world April 30th with over 200,000 people showed up. And we did the biggest online launch in the history of the world. And our passion, our desires became a movement. I mean, it is a movement. Right now there's over 24,000 people in over 80 countries sharing what they know, impacting lives and making a difference. And we truly are going to go on to change the education system. I think the education system will have to step up because we're making that much of an impact. We're going live again February 27, 2020. If we had 200,000 people last time and lots of FOMO, there was a Lot of people who didn't show up that wish they did. So make sure you mark that on your calendar. We've taken the course, the training, our strategies, the blueprint to a whole other level. Was that fun to watch from the outside?

Yeah, it was insane because it was fun to watch from the outside and all, you know, the attention it got and how many people's lives were being impacted with the KBB course. But also watching my husband work so hard and 24 hours, seven days a week on his phone, personally reaching out to affiliates and personally, you know, being so involved and you know, the whole team in the office working day and night to produce this amazing course was like out of this world. And everybody was so excited about it. Like, nobody treated it like a job. Everybody came in, like excited for the change. It was really cool to watch because especially behind the scenes, like video, that's.

The part nobody sees. Thank you for saying I love. I go, yeah, we did this thing, did the biggest launch. But the truth of the matter is so easy.

But I mean, you worked so hard on it.

The 60 days. Yeah, the 60 days before, I think it was, it was non stop and emotionally, like it's non stop because I sleep for two hours and I'd wake up thinking about what I want to do and how we want to share. It's like, listen, I've been in this for 20 entrepreneur for over 32 years in the education space for 20 plus. And I knew this was going to be the thing that could really make an impact and I didn't want to let anybody down. And here's a good thing to remember. I've been blessed to have some really good success in my life. Over 13 different companies, more success than I ever thought would be humanly possible. But when we launched KBB and Tony was the same way and Tony's got more success than me and 20 more years than me in this space. And I think you can attest to this. I played, I know this sounds simple, but I played like I was 10 points down the entire time. I remember, like, I didn't take it like, I've been doing this for 20 years. I got this, Tony's been doing it forever. We got this. I was playing like we could lose and I knew how important this was for the world. And I think, did you see that? Like, that effort?

I still do, yeah. I feel like even after this amazing launch, you still never celebrated it because you always feel like, I think that underdog mentality always will pop up, you know. But yeah, like My respects to you and Tony and the team. You guys worked so crazy, incredibly hard, and it's.

Well. And now we're going. Now we're going live again. I don't want to be, like, the guy who won the super bowl and then goes, oh, we'll just win again. So now I'm even, like, more stressed out. Like, everybody's like, oh, my God, you guys created the movement. And I'm like, yeah, yeah. But we got to keep the movement alive. So now I'm working harder, faster. We're two months away from going live again, and I feel like it's like the pressure is tenfold. I feel like we won the super bowl and we got to win again.

So that we did win the Super Bowl. You have to win again.

Yeah, we do have to win again. Exactly. The world deserves it, right?

So.

So the launch went amazing. And speaking of underdog, I launched my new book, the Underdog Advantage. We had the biggest record week of sales coming out of the gate. You're like, all this great stuff. What went wrong? I'll tell you in a moment what went wrong. The things that didn't work. Like, we thought the book launched super strong. So many people enjoying that book. You know what? All I wanted for that book, and it's working, is I wanted people, when they're done reading, to go, God damn it, I can do this. And whatever that means, I can do this. That means I. I can start the new business. I can scale the business I have. I can leapfrog my career. I could fix my life, fix my relationship. And that's all I wanted when their people were done.

Or I could continue what I'm doing. So many people are, like, in a funk or they're at a halt in their dreams. So, yeah, it's great.

And the biggest byproduct, though, is I want people who don't even feel like an underdog to recapture that underdog mindset. I guess the best way to describe it is going into that launch with Tony, I had an underdog mindset. I was hungry. I didn't. I wanted to be resourceful. I didn't care what people said. I was scared to fail. And the education system didn't see us coming. Like, we want the education to step system to step up. We're not trying to put them out of business. But colleges haven't evolved much in 70 years. So when they see so many people saying no to college and more into self education, learning from regular people who've done it, I think the college system is going to go, we better step up. And that's part of it too. So, you know, when you take on those big things as an underdog, if you can adapt an underdog mindset, I think it's a game changer. So we launched the underdog advantage. We launched our new journal, which came out super strong. People are absolutely loving the Journal. I know you love it.

I love the Journal. I know I switch my favorite colors every week. At first it was white, and then it's yellow, and then now it's red.

We hired 60 new people, 62 to be exact, over the last year. So we had an eventful year. And yes, we got pregnant. We're having a baby. The baby's due March 30th. We're having a boy. We're excited about that. And listen, we're not sharing all this to brag or just sharing a year end review because it couldn't have happened without you guys. Like, the most important thing is you guys listening. If this podcast does nothing more than allow you to see that. Lisa's parents were from Mexico. Mexican immigrants. Started with absolutely nothing. Sixth grade education her dad had. And when I met Lisa, she was a badass top hairstylist in Arizona almost 10 years in a row. Her own business crushing it. Making more than 99% of every hairstylist on the planet. Just a crazy, awesome boss babe that I'm so impressed by. I started with nothing, as most of you know. And to be able to sit here and share this with you guys and tell the evolution of our year, I've never even done it before. I've never done a year end review. This is inspired by my dear friend, Jenna Kutcher. I heard hers this morning and she told me I need to do this. And she told me I need to do this. So we're sharing. So they're the things that went right. And I feel blessed. I have gratitude on a regular basis. Some of the things that didn't go so good. So I want to share that. My book launch. I've been in this for so long. I'm blessed to be a multiple New York Times best selling author. My last book, millionaire success habits. Over 700,000. Well, I think we're over 820,000 copies now. I got to update my numbers. It's heading towards a million copies. This book I know is just as good. It's an amazing book, tells a story. But I got a little complacent. I've been so obsessed with kbb, so obsessed with so many new Things going on that I just thought, I'm just going to put it out there and it's going to sell like crazy. And when we first launched it, the numbers were flat. The pages that I created, because, remember, this is something I teach. If you build it, they will not come. Without marketing. If you build it, they will not come. That's a line from Kevin Costner's movie A Field of Dreams. I don't care how good your book is. 95% of all books in Barnes and Noble don't sell over a thousand copies. Did you really hear that? 95% don't sell over a thousand copies. So this is a great lesson. I didn't have as much hunger as I should have. I was a little complacent, and I just built it and thought they'd come. I released my new book the first three days in sales because it's so good. I know, but good has nothing to do with sales.

Exactly. And we know that.

But I know. It's what I teach. Almost every time I'm on stage, I present that, and I did it like, so this is like, I'm smiling here. But you know what? I felt like day three when sales were freaking flat, and I'm like, oh, my God, People in the world need this book. You were there. I didn't sleep.

I know.

And then I found that hunger, that underdog advantage. The damn book is called the underdog advantage, and I wasn't playing like an underdog. And I didn't sleep for two days straight. And I just obsessed and tweaked and shot new videos and created. And then it went on to be a really powerful opening week launch. And we're still tweaking and adjusting because everybody who reads it is losing their mind over it. So how can I not obsess on getting it in everybody's hands? If you haven't seen it, you need to go to deansbook.com. go there right now. Deansbook.com you have to get this book in your hand. But, like, I screwed up the first week, and here's the crazy part. Just four weeks earlier, I did almost the same thing with my journal. I just want to tell you guys, you need to have that hunger, that focus, that drive, that underdog mindset like, this might fail. I could do everything in my power. And you got to accumulate all the wisdom that you've learned through the years, and you got to write it down. You got to have a meeting, even if the meeting's internally, because the journal I've Been journaling. Here's my journal right in front of me. If you're on video, you can see it. I've been journaling the same way for over 25 years. I taught you how I journal. You freaking love it. I taught my team, everyone. The whole world that I teach is like, you got to teach people. So I take six months, I pick out the perfect colors, I pick out all the paperwork and the quotes and the process and the strategy and how to do outcome journaling and make it simple so it's not complicated. I do all that. I buy 100,000 journals. So it's like 400,000, $500,000.

I thought it would be not enough.

And I didn't think it would be enough. And I did the same thing. I just let everybody go. Hey, buy my journal's available. And we did great. I think we sold 18,000 journals the first week, which, God, I'm so blessed that. But not what I thought, because I didn't. I just said it and forget it. Like, duh. Like you say you don't do things wrong. Like, it's like, you know, if you hit your thumb with a hammer and it hurts, you know how you stop is stop hitting your thumb with a hammer. I did that with the journal and the book, and now we've got them both dialed in and sales are starting to really go. But it was stressful because, you know, it doesn't matter if you won the super bowl last year. Doesn't matter if you have a successful business here. You know, some of our KBB students are some of the most successful people on the planet, but they want to transition into another world. They want to make impact. They want to change people's lives. And sometimes you think, if I had success over here, I could coast and start a new one. Not the way it works.

Trust me, I know.

Not the way it works. So that's another one to think about. This office that we're in. So bought a new building. Bought a building was just a shell of a beat up old building. And I wanted to create something really special for our team. They deserve it. They're my family. If you're gonna spend this much time in an office, I believe it should be magical. We got a quote and we literally went two times over budget. I spent way insane amounts of money. And it just shows, no matter how much you do, I've been in real estate my whole life. If you're not watching, if you don't have clear cut parameters, if you're too busy doing other Stuff, which I was. And I wasn't watching. We went way over budget. Now do I feel grateful? Of course. The building's amazing. My team loves it. They feel like they're at a second home, but, yeah, way over budget to the tune of, like, $900,000 over budget. So that was a little crazy. And then I'd say another thing I failed at this year is not enough free time for me, which equates to me and you. I think I love what I do so much, which is a gift for every person listening or watching that I'm either doing it or I'm thinking about the doing it.

Right. That's true.

Yeah. So it's either time with you, time with the kids. Most time, that's the three of us together. And I feel like I didn't want to do it. It's work outside that. And I don't golf or fish or ski or hunt. And I think it's a blessing and a curse because I love what I do. What do you think about that from the outside?

I mean, you know what? Sometimes I have to remind myself that, hey, we should take more time just for you and I. But I think that you and I both love working so much, and we also love being with the kids, so we never feel bad that we've been working, working, working, and kids, kids, kids. And we're not doing stuff with ourselves, with each other, because we are always together, no matter what, anyways. But I agree, like, we are. I feel like sometimes we're just going on a treadmill like crazy, but we're not taking time to celebrate all of these awesome, beautiful women.

I know. As we wrote these down this morning, I don't think I celebrated any of them.

We didn't celebrate. I mean, we're grateful for them. I think we have definite gratitude. Crazy gratitude. But do we celebrate? Do we, you know, pop a champagne bottle and toast even though I don't drink champagne? No, we didn't do any of that, but. And life is. Life goes so fast. I feel like that's one thing. Next year, we really have to, like, stop and breathe and smell the roses.

Yeah. Jenna. Speaking of Jenna Kutcher, she yelled at us for that. Do you remember?

Oh, she did.

She yelled at us so good. And she's like, so, what are you doing to celebrate the KBB launch? I'm like, she goes, no, no, you need to call me and tell me. And then I was like, well, we're all going to Fiji. And she's like, that's not celebration. That's a mastermind in Fiji. That's bullshit. She said, I need to know.

Yeah, she's great.

She is really awesome. If you don't know.

Jenna should check her business for women.

Oh, balance. Oh, she got such a good balance. Her balance is so good. It embarrasses me. So. But she'll talk to me and go, your work ethic is. I need more of your work ethic. I need more of her balance. So it's all a balance. And listen, thank you so much for being a part of this podcast with us today. And I. I never did a year end review, and it really helped me to see all the incredible things we did. And I'm gushing with gratitude. But I also know I gave you about five things I screwed up, if you want to know. Truthfully, I probably have 20 things that I screwed up on. And what I'm going to challenge you to do. The same thing I'm going to do is I want you to really look back on the year and what were your wins and why did those wins happen and how can you do more of that in 2020? And then really obsess on what went wrong. I saw a pattern with the book launch and the Journal launch. I took things for granted. I just figured I had it so figured out. And the Journal was so great and the book was so great, they were going to sell themselves. Doesn't happen. Bullshit. If you have a great idea, you have a great company, you're going to do a great mastermind. You're writing a book, you're building a course, you have a brick and mortar building. It doesn't matter if it's the best of the best of the best. If you don't market, they will not come. You need to absolutely focus on your marketing and sales and getting your message out there, or else you got a great idea that nobody goes to. It's like having that amazing restaurant with the perfect food, but it's empty. Why? Because they're just not marketing. So that taught me a lesson to go back. And also working on my free time, I realized this year, as busy as that was crazy busy, there was no downtime in between. And I know I like it. The problem is I'm kind of an adrenaline junkie. I run on adrenaline. Everybody's like, how do you have so much? Do you get hyped up before video? I'm like, no, this is just me.

The same way.

No. We're so nervous right now because we're having a baby together and our personality is the same. We're afraid we're gonna have like a little like zing, zing, zing, boom, boom.

Like he's supposed to be an Aries baby, you know, if actually he's going to be an Aries baby. And you know, the sign of an Aries is very passionate and strong willed and energetic.

We're like, oh no, we're in trouble. And he's up all night.

And he's up all night. He's like bouncing around right now. I just feel like poking me.

He's like, I want out of here.

Did you ever sleep and. Yeah, so.

Well, I don't sleep.

Yeah, I sleep. But we're so energetic. But I could totally understand your frustration with the book and the journal and all that, like the salon. So Dean mentioned that I've had a great run in my career that I built myself to do. But the problem is I started a new business, which is great. But the problem with that is that since the pregnancy, I'm not doing chemicals. I'm not really hands on as much as I want to with clients. And so I thought if I open up this business, it's gonna be insane. Like, you know, people like flooding in, flooding in. And it hasn't been like that. So it is definitely right.

And now we're gonna turn on the marketing. But originally because Lisa has literally the best reputation in town, she just figured, same thing we did with the book and the journal. Once she opens the door, they will come. And they did.

They don't come.

But you watch over the next six months, we're going to mark it and fill it. But we have to put the time, effort and energy. Okay, this podcast got long enough. We appreciate you so much. Make this the year. Yeah, to be continued. But make it your year. Like, don't mess around. If you had a regretful, crappy 2019, let it go. Figure out what served you. Take it with you. Put fuel to it and throw the rest away. Yes, every year we get a new line in the sand and this can be your year. Do your own year end review. We appreciate you so much. This couldn't happen without you. And if you don't have my book, the Underdog Advantage, check it out. Deansbook.com and we'll talk to you soon.

Don't talk about it, be about it. People.

If you liked this podcast, make sure you rate it and also make sure to click subscribe so you never miss out. You can always follow us on Instagram. And if you don't already have millionaire success habits, you can grab it for free@deansfreebook.com Remember, all success starts here.