How To Succeed As An Underdog | The Innovation Advantage and Power of Enthusiasm

Innovation is a must. Underdog advantage, number three, innovation. Think about that. You see, I don't know how to, I don't know how to start a company that's not making money and raise a whole bunch of capital and use other people's money to see if you make it work. Now I'm not knocking that at all. It's because I'm limited on my knowledge on that. That's it. I'm just not smart enough to know how to do it. I have so many friends that are in Silicon Valley and everybody's fighting to come up with the next thing, the next widget, the next app, the next Facebook, the next Instagram. They're fighting for that. And a lot of these companies will go raise 20, 30, 50 million. Some of them raise 400 million before they've made a dollar, before they've made a penny. And then I look at, you know, if now again, I'm not knocking this. I don't want to seem like I'm bitter. I have so many successful friends that their families were successful and they just carried it on. That's what I want with. I don't want to have to make my kids suffer. I want to teach them the right value so they take on what I've done and start off where I left off, right? But just think about if everything went smooth, you weren't an underdog. Nothing went wrong in your childhood. Perfect parents, perfect income, perfect location, then you went to the perfect college. Then when you got out of the perfect college, you had the money to start a company. I've watched this happen. Sometimes when you have money to start a company, you're setting yourself up for failure because, because you don't need it to cash flow. So I'm going to use this one example, this one thought process is every company I've ever started. I sold firewood in high school, fixed wrecked cars out of high school, fixed wrecked cars for business, fixed wrecked cars to sell. And then I started buying run down houses and remodeling them and putting apartments in them. Then I started subdividing land and building houses. Then I went in the education business and then the book business and the live event business and then, you know, sharing now in masterminds and trainings like this, right? As I went through all those companies, never once in any of them did anyone ever give me money to start. So guess what? I had to be unfair advantage number three. I had to be innovative. I had to create cash flow, profitable companies. So now what you could say is, oh, Man, I have nobody in my family that's got money. I have nobody that's got faith in me to lend me money. I can't get any money from the bank, damn it. I can't go in business. Or you can say, hmm, I have no money. Banks won't give me money. I have no friends that will lend it to me, no partners. I gotta be innovative. I was an underdog with nothing and I had to use that to my advantage. And that advantage turned it into I had to find a way to be innovative. I keep using that word to be cash flow right away or I would be broke. So now take that underdog disadvantage and make it your underdog advantage. You don't have money. And if you don't think you can make something work without using money, then Google people that have Google. Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, me. So many successful people started with nothing. I know you might be facing stuff that I don't even know about. I get that. But here's what I know. Did you ever have a headache and you go online and you Google for what could this headache be? And by the time you're done, you feel like you got a tumor and you got three months to live, Right? We find what we are looking for. If you went online with a headache and wanted to search for someone and said, ah, you just didn't have enough water, drink a glass, you'll be fine, you could find that in two minutes. But our brains want to go towards the tumor and what could be worst case scenario. So we do that in our own lives, like, I don't have any money. Look, my friend tried with no money, it didn't work. You're just searching for what went wrong. Your subconscious is looking for security so you can feel safe about your inaction, get disturbed, get uncomfortable, go online and Google and find successful people who started with nothing, that had massive fear, that were scared. And all of a sudden you'll see all these people, all these millionaires, all these hugely successful people that started with nothing. And all of a sudden you start building momentum. And then you say, I'm going to create innovation here, I'm going to create cash flow. We're talking about business. But could that be the same in every area of your life? Of course it can. So think of the unfair advantage we have of being an underdog because we get to be creative. That was number three. Okay? Number four, unfair underdog advantage. Number four, enthusiasm over perfection. I want you to think about that. Enthusiasm over perfection. Now, I told you before about the Books. But I'll tell you, in life, I don't have a vast vocabulary and I can't spell for crap. I spell so bad that literally when I type, there's so many words lit up, it's like every third word is lit up. And sometimes the words, I try to respell them like four times. And if the computer could talk, it'd be like, yo, bro, I don't know what you're doing. Try something else. Or you're an idiot. I don't know. I'm glad it can't talk to me and I'll just come up with a simpler word. I don't have a vast vocabulary. I'm not the smartest guy in the room when it comes to book smart. I don't watch the news. I have no idea what's going on around the world. I don't. Clueless people come up and like, well, you know, what happened with, you know, Trump? Or you know, what happened in South America? Or, you know, I'm like, I don't, I don't. I haven't watched the news in probably over 10 years. All it does is bring me down. I don't want to. I protect my confidence. So I don't watch the news. I didn't have a lot of experience in these new companies. When somebody says, you're going to write a book or you're going to go on stage, hey, people say to me, I'm going to go on stage. And somebody say, did you take journalism in school? Did you go to college for that? Did you train under a mentor? No, no, no, no. No experience. And most of the times, like I said on the last one, I had no money. So here's what I know. Sometimes when you have all the I's dotted and the t's crossed, you're obsessing on perfection. You're obsessing on the details. You're over analyzing so much that it's causing you to be paralyzed and do nothing. Being an underdog, you're starting to wear this as a badge of honor, right? Did you feel that? I don't know if you did. I just. The way I said it, I felt it internally. Like, I want someone to go, I. I want to have a shirt that says I'm an underdog, right? Where I overcame things going where I didn't have the money or the vocabulary, or I didn't have the super smarts or the money or the experience, I masked with enthusiasm. And if you look at underdog stories from the movies, right? From the Horse races and the Olympics and the games that shouldn't have been won. When you take the. I don't know, what was it? What was it in the 90s when the American hockey team won before they let American athletes that were professionals play in the Olympics? You might know this story. You probably know it better than me. You guys can tell me. It was just college kids. And at the last minute, they just round up these college kids to play against the world's best hockey players in the world. And America won. Biggest underdog upset. But one thing I noticed, what did they have? I remember watching the Russian team, like, just no enthusiasm. Just like, I'm not going to try to talk with a Russian accent. I was almost dead, but I'm not even going to try. But I remember they were just like, these guys, they're not going to have any chance with us. No enthusiasm, just thinking they were going to do it. And then all of a sudden, the enthusiasm to me helped carry that team to win the Olympics. It was the biggest upset ever. But think of basketball games, think of horse races, Olympics in your own life, when you were the underdog. What carried me wasn't the book smart, wasn't the money, wasn't the experience, wasn't the vocabulary, surely wasn't the connections. I knew no one with money when I was a kid. You know what carried me? Enthusiasm. I just found a way to turn this. I can be the underdog with the anchor, carrying it, dragging it across the desert, or I could say, I'm a freaking underdog. They are never going to see me coming. They told me they can't watch what I do. Oh, I don't have money. I'll just get innovative. I'll find a way to get the money. I'll get the money. And that led to this enthusiasm that drove me. I hope that you see this is authentic enthusiasm. But if I really boil it back down, it came out because I was an underdog. I didn't have all the other stuff. So I had to go to the thing that boosted my confidence and got results, and that was having enthusiasm. So. So as an underdog, your parents or your friends may not have faith in you or support you, and that's heartbreaking. Did you ever have. Just like you watched me one day, you read my book or somebody else or you saw something online or you got involved in my real estate course and you're like, damn, I'm doing this. And you're using the power of. You can't. You don't even know you are you're being innovative, you're enthusiastic and you go tell the person you care about the most and they shut you down like a lid. Just like shutting off light switch. Like, oh, that's so dumb. This is the wrong time. You don't have the money and they shut you down. That's heartbreaking also, I've watched so many people when they have a desire for more. You're growing, okay, so, I don't know, maybe you guys can tell me. Ever happened in your life if you're watching me? You're someone who's working on your personal growth. You're working on your success. You want another level of life. You realize one of the biggest plights of our world is living knowing you have untapped potential. It's the worst feeling in the world. You know you got more gas in the tank, but you're not putting the throttle down because people are telling you and you can't. I just told my daughter I stole this from Sean Stephenson, my three foot giant, my dear friend. He said, don't ever let anyone dim your glow so you can match them. You're bright. People are like, nah, nah, nah. And a lot of times we turn down our lights so we can match that. Screw that. Brighten yours up more. But it's heartbreaking because here's what I want to ask and you guys can be honest with me. Have you ever been in a relationship? Could be family, friends, partnership or significant other. You're in a relationship, you, because you're here. There's a million other things you could be doing. You're here with me. You're working on your personal growth. You are your success abundance. You want to tap into that next level, not leave it. Don't die at 98 years old and go, wow, I had a lot more to give the world, but I didn't. Oh my God. Did you feel that? Screw that. I want to be like, nothing left. I'm done. Time to go. Nothing left. But think about this. You're working on your personal growth. You start with somebody. Here they are at this level, but they decide this is a perfect level for them. And all of a sudden you're continuing to work on your personal growth and you're going higher and you're going higher. And now they're saying, oh, stop, you're getting all foo foo. Oh, you're too. Oh my God. What are you going to go to a Tony Robbins event and jump up and down? You're going to go to a Dean Graziosi growth event and blah blah, blah. And all of a sudden you're going and on going and going, and you get to a point and they're like, oh, my God, we've grown. And somebody leaves you, or someone calls you, tells you that you're a dreamer or, you know, good. I've watched it happen so many times with people who desire another level of life because the people around you want to stay status quo, and you make them uncomfortable. So heartbreak is pretty high in this world, in this world of growing, of going to the next level. And that's okay because that's the way it's supposed to be. I believe God, the universe, whatever, believe designed it that way because they're meant to be with these people and you're meant to be with us. It doesn't mean you have to hurt anybody along the way. But there's a lot of heartache. There's a lot of heartbreak. So what I notice with underdogs who spin it into a win is they take that heartbreak from any area. From parents, from a relationship, from a marriage to a bad partnership. They take that heartbreak and they ball it back up. Poof. And use it as energy. So they transform heartbreak into leverage.