Master The Art Of Securing Your Future

We are responsible for our future as an entrepreneur. There's no one coming to save us. When you're ready to go all in, and I'm not saying any of you should quit what you're doing this second and just start from scratch, right? If you got income, wait until the new business starts replacing the income of the current and then you can decide if you're making a transition, right? But we have to take ownership of our choices, our decisions, our actions, and most importantly, our results. Sometimes when someone screws you over, things go wrong, we put it out there and it's easier just to look and go, how do I focus on this solution? How do I take responsibility for the outcome I desire and deserve? Even if someone else threw a monkey wrench in the gears, you're working with somebody that keeps throwing bombs your way. And it's like, ah. When you get to just say, as an entrepreneur, it's on me. I put that person in my life. I put myself in this situation. I'm here during this time. It just changes everything. It's so empowering when anything that goes right is yours and anything that goes wrong is yours. Just makes life super simple. How do we set up this new year to be the greatest year of your life? How do we overcome the outside craziness and uncertainty? You don't get second chances. And truly how you start the year is how you finish the year. Let's make this the year where the craziness doesn't affect us, that we get to affect the change. This is our reality. What's courage? Courage is moving forward even though you're a little scared. Courage is moving forward and you feel like an imposter. Courage is moving forward and you do have an uneasiness or you do have self doubt. That's what courage is. Confidence doesn't come until you're courageous. People are looking for this whiff of confidence to hit them and go, I'm bold. I can do it. Confidence comes after you take the action, after you fall a little, get back up. Courage evolves into confidence. Anything we can do to give you that little unfair advantage in this crazy world. If you know me, it's like my goal for the end of today is to realize that you can be the thermostat of your life, not the thermometer. I know that's a. If you're part of my family, you know, I say that a lot. You've heard it before. But think about that. There are so many people in your life that you know that are a thermometer if the news is good, they're in a good mood. If their relationship is good, they're in a good mood. If they ate good that week, they're in a good mood. Ah, the relationship is shitty. They're in a bad mood. The news was bad, they're in a bad mood. It's doom and gloom. They're doom and gloom. What are they really doing? They're just roller coastering. Whatever the outside temperature is, that's how they feel. And how can that give you sustainable happiness? It's not. We have to be the thermostat. We adjust the temperature. We decide our emotions, we decide what we think about, we decide what we focus on. And when you find that level of mastery, which is only a millimeter away from where most of us are, that's when life changes forever. And the outside world doesn't matter to you. You get to be the person that controls your destiny. I know that sounds kind of like controls your destiny, but isn't that what we want at the end of our lives? If you had a question and said someone else was in control of your emotions, your future and your income, or congratulations, you were in control of your emotions, your future, your happiness, and your income. Which one do you want? We want the second, right? So that's what we're doing here today. And I want to share how this happened to me. So we all have our stories. This isn't poor me, but as a kid, my parents were married 20 times. I moved 20 times. By the time I was 19 years old, we didn't have money. I lived in a trailer park with my mom for a while. I lived in a bathroom with my dad for almost a year. When there was no heat in the house, we just had a little electric heater that we could plug in and heat our little bathroom. I didn't know anything different. My dad was awesome. We figured all this stuff out, right? But all I knew is when I was really young, I watched my mom struggle. My mom's one of the sweetest women, sweetest humans I've ever met in my life. Both my parents are hard workers. My dad's a diligent hard worker. My mom was a hard worker. But I remember being like 12 years old and saying, they're working their tails off, but they don't have anything. They're working their tails off. And they keep going through relationships like crazy. They're working their tails off. I never get to see them because they're always working. And I just remember that old saying of, like, Hard work equals success. It's like I don't think so because they work pretty hard. My mom worked three jobs to make nothing. My dad worked in a collision shop every day. And I remember just thinking, if I follow and do what they do, I'm going to get what they get. Okay? We said we'd be like family and share. One of my biggest reasons that I ran away from being a broke kid and not want to. I didn't want to be my parents. I don't mean that disrespectfully. I love them more than life, but I didn't want their life. I didn't want their unhappiness. I didn't want some of the depression they had, some of the anger that my dad had. I didn't want that. We were always running and money was everything and that's all they talked about because they didn't have enough of it. I just remember saying, I don't want that. So here's where I had a kind of an epiphany in my life. I'm in probably my mid teens, 15 to 18, 20 years old. And I started being friends with some of the most successful people in my town that were way older than me. Dominic Afuso, Joey Noto and Mark Miller. Mark Miller was probably 78 or 80 when I was 20. And he was a famous artist way back in the 50s. And he retired in this little town. He had this great little winery and I just met him randomly and I ended up buying some property of him. He gave me property with no money down. I remember just becoming friends with them. This is where my journey and I want to share this with you because it's really important for you today where the journey of understanding that habits and success principles aren't these big grandiose things. They're these tiny little millimeter shifts that most people don't recognize. The little things aren't the big things. The little things are everything. And that's what I plan on covering today. But this is the first time that I can remember listening to them and everything they said was the complete. And when I say everything they said, it wasn't like an official mentor. I'd meet them for coffee, I'd drive up to their house, I'd bring them a bottle. I'd bring Mark Miller a bottle of wine. I probably brought him the shittiest wine. The he probably knew really expensive wine and I probably bought him some like white zinfandel in a box or something. I don't know. But all I know is they gave me the time of day, they felt great mentoring me, they felt great like sharing. And here's what I know, everything they said, anybody have this experience and maybe you do with me and you can't tell other people they were sharing stuff with me that was so different. And I was living with my dad at the time, so different than how my dad looked through the lens of life that if I would have told my dad, he would have been like, oh, don't listen to those old. But here's what I know. They were the most successful people in my town and they were really happy and they just had these little fundamental shifts that were complete opposite of what my mom and dad were doing. And I remember as I started implementing these things, they felt odd, they felt different, but they started to work and I started to get momentum. And by the time I was 20 years old, I, I had my own company and my dad was working for me. By the time I was 23, I had multiple, I had 27 apartments, I was building houses, I had a collision shop, I had a tow truck company. And then all of a sudden my life changed forever. That momentum led me. I never read books, I wasn't smart enough to do that. But something shifted in my late mid-20s. I bought Tony Robbins course. And all of a sudden with that momentum that I got from these older gentlemen by shifting my habits, my success principles, my disciplines, I became the complete polar opposite of my parents by the time I was 23. And I had more success by 24 than my parents had had their entire life combined. And then I got Tony Robbins course and that just changed everything. I realized learning from others who've already been there, who obsessively study is the fastest way to your end result. And after Tony Robbins, I devoured and I've been listening and reading books and being a part of it. And I'm blessed to be a multiple New York Times best selling author. And to go from that to starting over 15 companies, to been blessed to do hundreds of millions of dollars in my life and all these cool things and be married to the love of my life and be a parent, all of this happened. And I love the self education industry. If you know anything about me, if you're part of our self education industry family, I love all that. But it all started with what we're going to do today. I don't care what business you're in, if you ever felt like an imposter, if you ever felt like people would call you crazy for going after your dreams, then you're probably the only one here that feels that way. Because none of us ever felt that way. Of course, we all have. We all feel like imposters. We all have self doubt. We all wonder if we could do more, be more, lose the weight, find the love, or make the passion come back in your relationship, or start the business, or scale the business. We all doubt ourselves. Everyone does. But who moves forward are the ones that find the mindset to move forward uncomfortably to. To take uncomfortable action, to be the person that judges yourself on who you were yesterday and last year. As long as you're a better version tomorrow than yesterday, you're moving forward.