The WHY Of Challenge: Why Being Unique And True To Yourself Will Find You Success With Mike Koenigs

Foreign.

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to why institute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now let's meet today's guest.

Welcome to beyond you'd why podcast. We go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and then live your why. So if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. And so today we're going to be talking about the why of challenge. To challenge the status quo and think differently. So if you remember, if this is your why, then you don't believe in following the rules or drawing inside the lines. You want things to be fun and exciting and different. You rebel against the classic way of doing things. You typically have eccentric friends and eclectic tastes because after all, why would you want to be normal? You love to be different, think different and you aren't afraid to challenge virtually anyone or anything that is too conventional or too typical for your tastes. Pushing the limit and envelope comes naturally to you. So today I've got a fascinating guest for you. I've been looking forward to interviewing him for quite a while. His name is Mike Koenigs. Mike's passion is turning business owners into transformational business celebrity influencers. He's helped over 55,000 clients get attention, multiply their revenue, amplify, create awareness, become a best selling author, speaker, influencer and media master who can get and command attention. He's a 13 time number one best selling author, marketer of the year, serial entrepreneur, angel investor, filmmaker, international speaker and patented innovator. Mike built and sold his last two businesses to publicly traded companies. Most recent Exit was selling Traffic Geyser, an instant customer. His first Exit Digital Cafe was sold to the publicly traded interpublic group in 1999. Mike Koenigs is a stage three cancer survivor. After completing nine months of chemotherapy and 33 radiation treatments, his doctors say he's healthy and cancer free. His 13th book, CancerPreneur, gives anyone with cancer hope and a system for survival. Mike, thank you for being here. I'm looking forward to our interview.

Hey, thanks. That's a lot of stuff. So I apologize to everyone who had to listen through all that, man.

And I think there's more and we're going to get into more. But where I want to start, Mike, is take us back in your life. Take us through how you got to do all that fascinating stuff. Where were you born? What was your childhood like? Where did you grow up? Kind of give us the background of yourself.

Sure. I was born in Eagle Lake, Minnesota, so about two hours south of Minneapolis, the oldest of four kids. My dad's a barber. My dad was raised very poor on a small farm in Iowa. My mom is the daughter of. Her mother was bipolar. Her father was a philandering alcoholic. So I did not come from proverbial silver spoon stock, so to speak. And I was very motivated at a very early age to make money because if I wanted anything, my dad would say, well, what are you going to do to earn money? And so whether I started delivering newspapers, shoveling, raking, mowing lawns, painting, and I was working full time summers when I was 14, I started working the day I turned 16 at the one and only gas station in town. But along the way, I was basically, I'm an unemployable, uneducatable ADHD rebel. So authority and me don't mix well. And I was sent to a Catholic school for 12 years. You can imagine life for my parents and everyone around me. I was the first one to be sent to the office. And there was a lot of naughty following me around. Like, I had keys to the school. Don't ask me how I got them. If there was a way to hack or work around something or break the rules without breaking the law, I figured out a way. But that mindset enabled me to. I taught myself how to program. I was always good at taking things apart, putting them together. And my dad was a great mentor in the sense that from the age 5, I got a power jigsaw, okay? So it was like, go in the shop and make things. And my way of expressing myself was figuring out how stuff worked, making things, putting them together, taking them apart. And I know now if my parents would have had the wherewithal they didn't know how to contain someone like me. But I should have been handed, been given a mentor and never gone to school. Okay. It's just the way I learn is by doing. So I taught myself to code. A neighbor loaned me an Apple 2 computer when I was 14 years old. I taught myself to code, and over a long week of Christmas vacation. And then I started getting little gigs to teach business owners how to use their PCs. At the time, it was like Apple IIS, the early IBM PC. And then, you know, one person one day said, hey, do you think you can write a payroll system for me? And I'm like, yeah, I think I can do that, having absolutely no idea what I was doing. But I taught myself PASCAL and later on C and learn languages. And then when I was 18, a neighbor, one of my best friends, his father worked for Scurry Univac, and they needed a nerd to figure out how to make a PC, talk to a submarine computer. And I got cleared by a general, flown out to San Diego, went into an underground bunker, and made two computers talk to each other that the old guys couldn't figure out. Then I started writing video games, started an agency. So it was like one thing led to another, but the answer was, if someone said, do you think or can you do it? The answer was always, yeah, I think I can. It wasn't, have I ever done it before? Or do you know how to do it? That wasn't the question I was answering. So that's probably the best way to get this started, is I probably would have wound up in prison or being an entrepreneur, you know, and it's not because I'm bad. It's just because I don't fit in. And I've always been an alien.

That's perfect for the why of challenge. I mean, that's what it is. Was there ever a time where you felt like a fish out of water? Like, obviously, like, where you just kind of felt like this. It's a curse for you. Like, what I was given. Why can't I think like everybody else? Why can't I be like, why can't I fit in?

Well, I think the answer to that is I'd rather be lit on fire than be like everyone else. I always felt like an alien, and I was proud of it, but it didn't make it easy. So I wasn't interested in anything the other kids were interested in. Like, to this day, I'll have one of my best friends calls me out and he'll say, hey, you coming over for the big game this weekend. I'm like, dude, I have absolutely no idea. Is it, you know, what's the basketball? No. He'll be like, no, it's the Super Bowl. Okay? It's not that I don't like sports. It's. I'm incapable of thinking about them. And if I go to a baseball game, for example, I'm looking at the architecture going, God, I wonder which bolt you'd have to take out to make this whole thing collapse. You know, that's where my brain goes. Or, you know, where's all the weight being balanced in this thing? Where's the. You know, that's the. So I'm not tuned to think like ordinary, normal people. And I'm not saying I'm extraordinary. It's just I've always been an alien. When I was a kid, I had a backpack packed all the time. And the first time I ever heard of Apple computers, Steve Jobs and Wozniak, I was probably 12, 13, something like that. And my goal was to run away from home and go work for Apple. That's all I ever wanted to do, is get the hell out of Eagle Lake, Minnesota. And because I wasn't good at anything, I had to figure out a way to get the hell out of Eagle Lake, Minnesota. I mean, there were 763 people in my town.

The first money I ever bought, I bought a pinball machine. And I figured out how to clean it and take it apart and put it together. I started building and putting together stereos and electronic instruments and built a studio, and I built electronic turntables for the speakers that I moved back. And it was like, that's what I was into. So was it a curse? Yeah, it sucked. Okay. But without that kind of pressure, without feeling like an outcast, and at the time, there weren't other people like me. And when I finally met them, I was like, you know, I met my family. I created my family. And I wasn't born into the family. And really, one of my first breakthroughs is I figured out how to crack software. Basically, I figured out how to remove copy protection from video games. And that was in the hacker community. That was a really great skill to have. And that got me my first programming job because it turns out a game development company I work for, not only did they write video games, but they're really good at creating copy protection. And the founder also created copy removal software. Okay. So it's like. And so when he heard that I had that skill set, he said, well, do you think he can write us a new game. And I said, yeah. But that led me to meeting a guy who became my first business partner, who he and his Brother John made five feature length movies on Super 8 film before they graduated from college. So I'm like this nerd kid who was into computer graphics and animation and gaming and they made movies. So we became the perfect nerd team. And we started one of the first digital marketing agencies in the world called Digital Cafe. And that led to. I figured out how to build screensavers and I put them on CompuServe, America Online and Prodigy. And I got Sony and 20th Century Fox to say, hey, can you make movie promos for us? And then, you know, it's like it was always one weird thing led to another weird thing. And we eventually made a video game that shipped in 6 million boxes of cereal for General Mills. I don't think that kind of mindset, like if you meet game developers and whether it's an Elon Musk or Gates, who I'm not comparing myself to, but they were weird kids who did weird things and thought about weird things.

So when I first heard of you, I think in 2009, because I had been working with John Assaraf and he was coaching me on some of the things that I was trying to accomplish at that time. And you spoke at one of his events and I think you were at that time, Traffic Geyser was kind of your thing. So kind of tell everybody what Traffic Geyser was, how you developed that. Because I remember Digital Cafe, but I remember I used Traffic Geyser and it was super helpful at the time. You hacked into how to send videos everywhere all at once. And it was super helpful for SEO.

Yeah. So here's the backstory. So when I sold Digital Cafe, my business partner and I took the money and we made a feature film because that was our promise to each other, is we had to make a movie someday. Which turned into an unpleasant experience because I learned the hard way that if you don't own your own distribution, you're somebody's bitch. Okay. And making movies Hollywood style sucks. It is a big game with rotten people who play power games and they're abusive, rotten animals in general. Now it's changed a lot because the industries had to change. And now that there's a YouTube and self distribution, but back then there wasn't. So getting past the negative side. And we got bought by a billion dollar advertising agency and a multibillion dollar conglomerate and we got ourselves fired within 60 days because they violated our employment agreement. And we're like, we called them on it. So they paid us to go away. But during that time, I was really interested in the early web, and I figured out how to automate SEO. And after I sold the company and we made our movie, I started consulting and working with companies like Citrix and some others. And they were doing events. And back then, the way you got traffic to your websites is you had to figure out how to create SEO pages. Okay? So a buddy of mine and I wrote some software that allowed US to make 50,000 highly optimized web pages a minute. And then I figured out how to submit them. And I could dominate and own the search engines, like in minutes and basically any keyword you wanted. I knew how to make the web go to it. And that's back when there wasn't a single Google. There was Yahoo. Look Smart, Goto, Lycos, AltaVista. There were tons of search engines, okay? And if you could trick one search engine, you could trick them all. And because my software, I could adapt so quickly, and there wasn't such a thing as content spam, it wasn't bad to create highly optimized search engine pages. I just figured out how to do it really fast. And I was getting paid like 50 grand to create lots of optimized pages because for them, they could make millions of dollars selling tickets to their events. All right, so call that step one hacking search engines. Step two was if you fast forward a little bit. My wife and I had moved to San Diego, and I created my first information product, which was called the Internet Infomercial Toolkit. Basically, I adapted the television infomercial to the web and was showing early web people how to use video to sell stuff online. Now, this is before there was a YouTube. It cost a fortune to put your stuff online and stream video. It could cost you 10 or 15 or 20 grand a month just for in hosting fees. But Google was experimenting with something that was called Google Video at the time. This is before they acquired YouTube. YouTube really didn't exist. It was a beta. But I figured out how to upload my video to Google Video and take their player and embed the video on my own webpage. But also to remove their branding. I created a little tool to do that, made it part of the infomercial toolkit. And then I had a client, it was a hospital that did integrative and alternative therapies in Mexico. And we got paid to manage their stuff. And they were also my guinea pig. Everything I was working on, I Figured out how to make it work for them. And of course they cared about getting people to see their stuff and sign up. And I got a call from the client one day, and they said, whatever you're doing, it's freaking work and keep on doing it. We got four bookings this morning, and they've been coming in all week. And I'm like, you bet. I have no idea what I had done and what was working, but I just went along with it. And then I'm like, what the hell is going on? Well, it turned out I'd put all these videos into Google Video, put it on the website, but I keyword loaded all the videos in such a way that they were showing up at all the major search engines. And I did some tests, and I figured out, well, if I uploaded something and named it, it'd show up in Google and in Yahoo and the other search engines, like, within 15 to 20 minutes. And I'm like, holy crap. Hit the jackpot. And then I'd re upload the same video using different keywords that showed up too, and it was driving traffic straight to their website. Anyway, I went and met with a guy that I met at an online marketing event and told him about this. And I said, I got to find a developer who can automate what I figured out. And he goes, I got two guys, they're really hungry. So we created some code, and originally I just built it for me. I knew some of the online marketing guys, some of the OGs, like Jeff Johnson, Frank Kern, and Jeff Walker, those guys. And I showed it to a few of them. They're like, holy crap. And one of them offered to pay me 25 grand if he could just use it. I'm like, that's pretty cool. And I told another guy, and he goes, I'll pay you 50 grand if I can use it, but you don't let him use it. And that's when I turned to my partner at the time and I said, let's make a product. And that's what became Traffic Geyser. So after that, it evolved, and when YouTube came out and all the other search engines and we figured out how to glue it together, it was like, upload a video, give it a name, push button, make money. It was insane. And it lasted as long as it lasted. And then we wound up creating a product that did kind of the same thing with mobile text, which was called Instant Customer. And then we created information products that taught people how to start their own marketing agency using Traffic Geyser, an instant Customer and providing services to small business. So it was like we created little micro industries kind of by accident. That's the truth. But that's essentially the story of Traffic Geyser.

Yeah. And they last for how long? Like, what's the typical run for something like that?

Well, Traffic Geyser launched officially in about 2005, and it was a strong tool probably until about 2016.

Now, the truth is it didn't really get traction until 2007, so. And then there were issues along the way. And what we had to do is eventually it was a bad thing to create what became and was called content spam. Okay. But in the early days of email, everyone loved hearing you've got mail. You know, it was like, oh, my God, I have email. Great, I'll check it. And then you'd sign up for a whole bunch of stuff so you could hear you've got mail over and over again, and you're like, yay. But pretty soon there was spam, and it's like, spam bad. Well, same thing happened with content where getting SEO was a great thing until it got really abused. And we had to then protect ourselves from abusive users. We had to prevent bad people from spamming bad content. I mean, it was like. And we had to be really careful that we didn't get spotted or found. So our systems, we were. You know, the technical term was we had thousands of virtual IPs located all over the world because we could get shut down. So we were. It was like playing whack a mole on both sides. So the answer is, I think the big run was probably 2007 through 2016. And then after that, we had to really tone down what we're doing, be super careful, make everything compliant, and make certain we weren't violating any rules or laws. And like I said at the time, it was like, you know, when there's a lot of buffalo on the rain and you don't think about conservation, everyone goes out, shoots a bunch of buffalo, right? And that's kind of what it was like.

And so now you've got to try to play by the rules. How does that fit with you?

Well, it sucks, my friends. So as soon as the masses move in, you know, as soon as I had competition, I got bored, right? As soon as I was compared to someone else, I got bored. Or I had to justify and explain to someone how some crappy free software that sucked and did bad things how we were better. And, like, people believe whatever they read or see. So, you know, or if there's Rules and regulations. You know, life becomes very unfun. And I prefer, you know, as soon as there's someone else playing the game, I'm gone. And that's one of the reasons why we never brought in investors. We built that company and generated tens and tens of millions of dollars for quite a while and provided a lot of value, but it was the wild, wild west. And then as soon as social media started picking up, it was very uninteresting. And there's a lot of fake. As soon as there's fake lips, fake butts, and fake boobs, it's time for me to go. So when the world became Kardashianized, I'm like, I'd rather start myself on fire. Having investors meant those are customers who try to tell you what to do that you can't fire. Nothing about that is appealing. And I've long learned that I'm not going to play well with others if I'm not what I am. And if you put a lion in a cage, they're not a lion anymore.

Yeah. Traffic Geyser worked great for me for many years, so I got to thank you for that, because I used that back in the day for my dental practice to get noticed. You know, we built a great product, but nobody knew about us. And once we started using Traffic Geyser and sending out the 30 videos and all the stuff that you told us to create. Right, 30 videos to every site that was available. Man, we were on the top of Google for, I don't know, 10, 15 years.

It was unbelievable. It was the closest thing to an ATM machine that I've ever been part of or witnessed. And it's like the early days of advertising with Google, ppc, or even Facebook advertising. It's just like you want to be at the beginning of the curve or the cryptocurrency craze. Right. I mean, anyone who bought Bitcoin for 10 bucks and sat on it or forgot about it and was able to get it again, they're happy as clams now, right?

Yeah, exactly. Well, so then you kind of got connected to Tony Robbins and a lot of other people. That really skyrocketed you in another direction, it seems like.

Yeah. I think the backstory there was back when I had Traffic Geyser or before that, when I had Digital Cafe. I often say my first business cost me my first marriage, and my second and third businesses almost cost me my second marriage, my relationship with my son, and my life because I had cancer along the way. So what did happen, though, is When I had Digital Cafe, we were struggling for a while, and it was a combination of mindset, divorce. I was drinking a lot of beer. I'm a young kid, I don't know any better. And even though we were doing what looked like sexy projects for sexy businesses like BMW and these big agencies in Hollywood, they don't pay their bills on time. And you live and die on the basis of your creativity and your team. And there got to a point where I was $250,000 in debt. I was kiting credit card checks to pay our bills. I was living on a gas card to eat. I mean, I was living out of the Super America on 7th street in downtown St. Paul. And a friend of mine went to a Tony Robbins event, had a massive turnaround. He went from being, you know, he spent five years in college, and I think he was still a sophomore. His mother died when he was young. His father was a former alcoholic. So this guy struggled chemically, and he disappeared. And the next time I saw him, six months later, he had lost a bunch of weight, quit drinking, wrote a book, became a bestseller, was speaking and traveling, and just bought a brand new car for cash. And I'm like, what the hell happened to you? And he goes, tony Robbins. So I vowed to sign up for Tony next time. I saw an infomercial on tv, which it just so happened that night he took me out for. I came home, opened up my mailbox. Inside was a brand new credit card. I walked upstairs. Somehow I still had cable. I turned on the TV and guess who was on TV but Tony Robbins. So I rush, ordered personal power, had it delivered, listened to 15 minutes, and signed up for all this stuff with a fresh credit card, thinking I was going to experience a miracle. And I wound up in Kona, Hawaii, jacked. I had literally everything on the line. And I walked into a room filled with thousands of people jumping up and down and giving other back massages and hugging. And I thought I was screwed. So it took a little while, but I decided after two days of being grumpy, to jump up and down and scream and shout. And I walked out of there a week later with a life plan that I executed on. And less than a year later, our company was sold to a publicly traded company. It turned my life around. And I too quit eating meat, quit drinking, got in great shape, started meditating, doing kundalini yoga. I mean, the whole ball wax. That also led me to meeting Deepak Chopra. Wayne Dyer, my wife, who used to run Deepak's marketing. And once we Moved to San Diego. A couple years later, someone who had worked with Tony for almost 20 years called me up and said, Tony really needs some help with marketing. Do you think you'd meet with him and help him? And I'm like, hell yeah. So I met with them, we talked about, gave him some ideas, and I said, hey, Tony, I got an idea. I have an idea to create a business event, some products, and I'll introduce you to the smartest and best marketers in the world. So I called up Jeff Walker, Frank Kern, Mike Filsaime, bunch of other guys, and then later Brendan Burchard, Russell Brunson. And we ended up creating a product called the New Money Masters of Tony. We prototyped and created what is now Business Mastery. We all spoke at it. At the first one, he brought us in and he said, this is the future of business. Meet the New Money Masters. So he legitimized us and we cross promoted and helped him and created a launch, made millions of dollars. And to this day it got them aligned and using digital marketing. And what I did is I just introduced him to some of the smartest people. And to this day he's working with people like Dean Graziosi and Russell and still works periodically with Brendan and some other guys. And then from there, once word gets out that you've worked with one celebrity, a lot of people reach out. And because I had a software company, because I had a real business generating recurring income, everyone wanted to know, how'd you do it? Will you do it with me for me? And yeah, that's basically what happened. And what I learned is it's great to work with celebrities to build your brand. Most of them have a very short attention span. They're very much proximity oriented personalities. It's hard to have a deep, meaningful relationship. And they're surrounded with people who are easily threatened by anything outside of the status quo because it means their mama or their dad might be taken away from them. So it's navigating that can be very, very challenging.

And so that takes us up to now. What are you doing today? What's Mike Koenigs up to? You've done so many different things, gone in so many different directions, had so many different successes. Now what?

Well, after I sold Traffic Geyser, an instant customer, there's a whole story there. But the net net was. I had a big studio, a lot of gear, and I had cancer along the way. And while I was recovering from cancer, I wrote my first book and published it using something that was brand new. At the time, it was Amazon kdp. And I figured out how to hack Amazon to become a bestselling author. And when I got out of finished cancer treatment, we created a product that became published in profit. So we figured out how to very rapidly write books, become a bestselling author, crowdsource the upvoting, we'll say, meaning we did crowd buying, which we could make Anyone a number one category, bestseller in 24 hours or less. And that turned into an event. Well, then that turned into publish and profit. Speak in profit, creating profit. Like how to turn your wisdom and knowledge into products and then consult and profit how to coach, consult, advise. And then we did something. We called it Celebrity Bootcamp, which was we media trained people in our studio, taught them how to be on radio and tv, because I figured out how to get on radio and TV really quickly. So that became a business. We called it you everywhere now. And then about three years ago, I woke up and Facebook and Instagram and social media marketing and advertising frankly, sucks. It just. It's hard. It's saturated. It's very opaque. And I think everyone's figured out at this point those companies are evil. And I just couldn't do it anymore. I didn't want to do another upsell and an info product and a funnel and manage the people. Everything about it became unfun. And so I quit. I sold everything. I shut down. I did one more of every event. I gave everyone a chance. I said, I'm leaving the business. I'm retiring from information marketing and online marketing. And I'm only going to do what I consider to be deep, meaningful, soulful work. And what I couldn't articulate at the time is I had outgrown who I was, what I did, why I did it, who I did it for. And I felt like I was going to die if I didn't quit. In fact, I was downright suicidal and depressed. And I wasn't suicidal enough that I'd take my own life. I just wanted a truck to run over me, you know, that's how I felt. And here I am. I did not feel like I had permission to complain because I've lived a great life. I kind of did the American dream, made plenty of money. I got a place on the beach. I'm married to an amazing person. I got a great kid, he goes to the best school. I drive what I want, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I'm like, I felt empty. And so I fortunately found an elegant way to shut it down, wind it down. I sold the business and the products. And then I did something that I was frankly terrified to do. And it took a long time to get my courage back. Like, I just lost my fire. And when I got it back, I realized what really lit me up is I wanted to help business owners and founders who oftentimes go through their dark night of the soul midlife crisis and don't feel valued, don't have anyone to talk to about it. They just hit that end and are like, how do I feel valued again? How do I feel safe saying I'm lost and I don't know how to get my mojo back. And I help them build their brands, create, reinvent themselves, or I go into businesses and find new ways to reposition and elevate the company and create new products and messaging and kind of take all the skills I've learned and put it all together. But I've worked with people I love, so now I have fewer clients, I have more impact, and I really get to know my customer. Because when you've got tens of thousands, you're working in your business, not on it, and it's really, really hard to have deep, meaningful relationships.

So who would be an ideal client for you right now?

So the profile is you'd run a. Usually it's a $3 million or greater company, meaning you've got sales, you've got momentum, you've been delivering products and services. If you're a startup, you'd have to have been there, done that. Meaning you've built and sold a business and you're starting up again. And mostly it's men and women, usually in their 40s, up to 70s, and they've hit that brass ring and they're like, what next? Or if you answer the question, what I really want to do isn't what you're doing. It's time to move on. Okay. And so you're a quick start. If you're a Colby person, which means you're like an 8, 9 or 10, meaning you know it, you feel it, and you go for it. If you're a high fact finder, you are definitely not my kind of person. If you have to have four meetings and ask for thousand questions, definitely not my person. You have a history of being coachable, belonging to groups like EO, YPO, Strategic Coach, Genius Network, Abundance, 360 something that and you love, love creativity, innovation, collaboration, and you're just in the mood for more. And the idea of simplicity and elegance and less just sounds like a symphony to your soul.

And then you're the guy for that. And so tell us now, what would you do with them? What's your process? How does it work?

Yeah. Well, what I do is I start by asking a simple question, which is if you and I were to meet three years from today, what would have happened personally and professionally for you to feel satisfied and happy with your progress, also known as the Dan Sullivan question. And I really want to know, like what lights you up? What's your superpower unique ability and where would you spend 99% of your time if you could, if you weren't afraid of something else? And then I ask a couple more questions and from there we begin with, it's a variation of this theme, but we usually spend three days together. I call it Superpower Accelerator Vision Day. So we get together and I will do one of two key things depending on the type of personality you have. So either I will sit down and this is my team and I, it's not just me, but we will find money in your business that you don't even see and help you get it. So like for example, we worked with a company that's raised $40 billion in the investment world and they offered a high end service, they got paid based on assets under management. But we created a whole training division so we found a way to sell their ip. And also the founder, he has the it, he's got charisma, but he hadn't really built a platform for himself. So we worked on the personal platform. So as an example, so that would be one. Another one was a guy I met, his name's Justin Donald. I actually have his book here. I showing it off today. So this is a guy who had a regular job, his wife was a teacher and he studied investing and he decided to have a goal because his wife and him weren't seeing each other very much. They have a young daughter and his goal was to generate enough passive income on continuity so his wife could quit her $65,000 a year job, which he did and then he did it for himself. So now that he's financially free, it's like, what else is he going to do? And I met him and I asked him, do you have a book? No, but I'd like to. Do you teach anything? I'd love to. Do you speak? No, I'd love to. I look them up, you can't find them anywhere. And I'm like, well, you met the right guy at the right time. And I helped him create a full brand which is called the Lifestyle Investor. We wrote the core of the book I pinned him on, I wrote an article about him, an entrepreneur. I called him the Warren Buffett of lifestyle investing. So now when you search for Warren Buffett, his name comes up. He owns and trade. We trademarked the Lifestyle investor. Lifestyle Investing bought the domains. I gave him his first client. So now he charges $250,000 to work one on one with people to coach them on doing what he does. He's got a $50,000 a year mastermind. Both are full. He's got a podcast, he interviews tons of billionaires and really interesting people. He has access to anyone he wants. And he went from zero to a million in revenue in less than eight months. And now it's a multimillion dollar business. Plus he's still investing and spending time with his wife and kids. So I always say it's either build your platform as a founder or find money and elevate your business. And we start and we figure it out in three days. And oftentimes we make huge progress, but then we work together over the year to build it out. So it's challenging work. It definitely makes brains break. It's hard, but I think it winds up being some of the most satisfying work I've ever done. Because we had one guy, his name's Charlie Epstein, we created a one man show, he is the only financial advisor in the world with a one man comedy show called Yield of Dreams, which sounds nuts, but three weeks ago he filled up two audiences, two nights in a row, got standing ovations and. And it's all about removing the pain of money. He's teaching and educating you about money and what he calls desirement, not retirement. And for that I put together a team of three comedy writers and we wrote a comedy show and did the core of it in three days. We just sat down and invented a new future and something that, it's non obvious.

Find interesting ways to become human expressions instead of human doings, human knowings or human beings. I think that's the highest state of evolution is being a human expression.

And you've kind of gone through that same thing yourself, right? That's, that's your path and now you're giving that to somebody else.

Yeah, I mean, if you look at my entire life, it has to do with hack the system, bypass the bull, reinvent, reinvent, reinvent, and always, always be unique and different and ahead of the curve. I call it a category of one. If you can become a category of one brand, if you hear Beyonce, Jay Z, Obama, Oprah, even the T word, trump you know, they are unique category of one brands. Doesn't matter if you like them or not. Okay, you know who I'm talking about. And Sting, you know, but if you put them on top, they're the highly visible. But if you talk to a lot of people, they're like, I don't want to be famous. I want my anonymity. I'll say, well, maybe you have. Have you heard of Max Martin? How about Daniel Lenoir? How about Matthew Mutt Lang? And they'll be like, I don't know who you're talking about. Well, it turns out Max Martin, next to Paul McCartney and John Lennon, he has more number ones than anyone else alive. He's worth a half a billion dollars. He could walk on the street, no one would know who he is except people who need to know him, because he's produced music for Backstreet Boys, Justin Timberlake, Madonna. The list goes on and on. And the same is true. Daniel Lenoir. He's the reason why U2, when Joshua Tree came out, gave him that unique sound. He's like a producing master. Matthew Mutt Lang, he's the reason why AC DC blew up along with Def Leppard and many, many, many other Shania Twain. There's some of the most brilliant producers in the world. So to me, I'd rather be wealthy, powerful, but Anonymous. I don't care if anyone knows who I am, except the people need to know who I am, and I'd rather be the guy behind the scenes. And I think most people, you know, they think they want celebrity and fame. I think being a niche, niche famous. But Anonymous is a great life. You can have a great life. You can move mountains if you want to or need to. But in the meantime, you can just be with your family. You can express yourself, you can have impact, you know, and some people might not resonate with that message. That's fine. I don't, you know, I don't need more friends. I'm perfectly, perfectly fine. I'm. I'm good.

So what has been the secret to your ability to hack so many things? How do you do that? What goes through your mind as you're trying to figure out this hack? Because you've done it a lot of times. It's not just like once and you got lucky. It's like everywhere you go, you hack things. How do you do that?

Well, I think the first thing I ask, anytime, I mean, anyone who knows me knows the first thing I'll ask is, how does that work? And then how'd you make that what's inside. And if you can be taken apart, I'm going to take it apart. First thing I'll do is I'll look online and I'm going to look at the schematics. Like, I learned how to read schematics really early on. That's when I got my electromechanical pinball machine. It's filled with wires and solenoids and switches. And I'd follow the wire, I'd get to where the wire began and where the wire ended, and then what got sent along the wire. And the same. True. I started building computers early on and stereos. And I love taking stuff apart, figuring out how to put it back together. I'm more bored with putting it back together. And then when software came around, it'd be like, well, how do you make that? How does it work? And then I think when I was younger, I saw the game War Games and Hackers, and I was really motivated by. If you ever heard of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, they created something called a blue box phone. Freaking is what it was called. And there was a way to generate tones that could emulate the sound of a quarter falling into a payphone so you could make free phone calls. Well, of course I built one. Want to figure out how it worked?

And then I'd be like, I'd find out what the penalties are if you get caught. So if I'm going to figure out how something works and it's looked down upon again, you're not rewarded for figuring out how things work and how to get around the regular rules. That's a threat. And like, I wasn't going to profit from taking, stealing, or breaking something. I just want to know how it worked. But I'm going to protect my backside. So then I'm going to figure out if how do we prevent being seen or caught. That seems to be a logical conclusion. And then the more I read about, again, I kind of look at today in cryptocurrency. I genuinely believe that banking and Wall street is a protectionist, rigged system that protects people who didn't necessarily earn their way to the top. Okay, now again, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. Don't believe in that. It's just that I think the system's rigged and it's not rigged for the rest of us. And I think cryptocurrency is a good thing. So right now is a great time to be in the business. And I don't believe in tax evasion. I think everyone should pay their taxes, but you should legally pay as little as possible. Just don't break the law. But I think understanding the edges of the rules are important. And I think there's an injustice to folks who are intellectuals and builders and engineers, and they're looked down upon. And it wasn't long ago and nerds were looked down upon. And now if you ask a young girl, would you rather be with a quarterback or a football player or the next Bill Gates, I can tell you what the answer is. You know, it's good to be a nerd. And when you and I grew up, it wasn't cool. Nope.

Okay, last question. I know we're getting near the end here. Last question for you. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given? Or the best piece of advice you've ever given?

Find a mentor. Find a coach. And the way I would illustrate that is. So I do two podcasts on my own now. One is with Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach, who I regard as one of the smartest, brilliant, wisest men I've ever known. He's 77 years old, and he's written seven books this year. He is so productive and so in charge of his mind. And he has a plan to live to be 156 years old. He reframes everything. That's a challenge. He only sees in the world of the game from an abundance mindset. And every time I'm with him, I learn so much, and it's an incredible gift to be around someone so wise. And the second podcast I do is with a guy named Gay Hendricks, who wrote the book the Big Leap and now almost 40 other books. Another brilliant wise man. He's 76. So I think spending your time with our wise elders and understanding the value of wisdom, wisdom means you do not have to make the same mistakes. So the more time you spend studying history and being around wise people who've been there, done that, respecting them, but yet looking for how can I do better? So every year, I invest a minimum of $250,000 in coaches belonging to masterminds and groups running my own. And without that, I feel naked and empty. And frankly, I don't wake up every morning feeling smart. I have to earn that sense. I have to earn my wisdom. And the truth is, I outgrow who I am every couple of months. And I get itchy. And I've learned to love that itch instead of despise it. Now status quo is my greatest enemy. Good enough is never good enough, and I'm great Thinking that way. It used to frustrate me. And I know there's some people, you know, I'll cook them, I'll burn them out. You know, I'm a little bit of a nuke to be around. And I used to. It's still. It's not like it doesn't frustrate me sometimes. I know, and I can look at someone's face and I'm like, man, I just lost you, didn't I? It's like, yeah, it's time for me to go. Like, thank you, and I'm sorry.

Well, Mike, thank you so much for taking the time to be here, man, this is awesome. I wanted to hear your story, connect with you again. And thanks for being here. I look forward to staying in contact as we move forward and see how we can do some things together, because you've made me think a lot and challenged kind of some of the things that I thought I knew. It's been super helpful for me, so thank you very much. Now, if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to connect with you?

Sure. Well, I'll give you two ways. One is you can just send an email to mike koenigsegmail.com it's my first and last name. I have a website by the same, and the shortcut is paidforlife.com. there's lots and lots of freebies on there. And then, of course, just subscribe to my podcast with Dan Sullivan, which is Capability Amplifier and the Big Leap with Kay Hendricks. Those two are. You know, I have two modes these days. In the old days, I had products and upsells and everything. Now it's free and really expensive. There's nothing in between. And it's just because if you want to work with me, it's a skin in the game and a commitment. Otherwise, it's like there's so much free stuff, and I produce an enormous amount of content every week, and I'm always trying to stay in the conversation. So what's the pain that you're experiencing? Chances are either I'm feeling it too, or I have. And it reminds me that, wow, I haven't talked about that yet. So it's time for a new episode or a new tool.

Awesome. Mike, thank you so much for being here.

It's my pleasure. Gary, you're a great interviewer. I'm really proud of you. I'm very, very impressed with the tools that you put together as well. You know, the YOS is brilliant. I loved, you know, just last week I got to interview you. So the it got, you know, we got to do the play the other game. And I love your story. I love what you've done and I love your evolution. The fact that you've reinvented yourself as well is a testament to the fact that you ask great questions and you put together a brilliant, brilliant tool also. Thank you. And I appreciate your evolution, your development, your commitment to excellence. Thanks.

Thank you. I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest, you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez and I'll see you on the next episode.