The WHY Of Make Sense: Unlocking Your Best Self By Finding Your Genius With Mike Zeller

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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 we can see how their why has played out in their life. And so this week we're going to be talking about the why of Make Sense to make sense of the Complex and challenging so if this is your why, then you are driven to solve problems and resolve challenging or complex situations. You have an uncanny ability to take in lots of data and information. You tend to observe situations and circumstances around you and then sort through them quickly to create solutions that are sensible and easy to implement. Often you are viewed as an expert because of your unique ability to find solutions quickly. You also have a gift for articulating solutions and summarizing them clearly and in understandable language. You believe that many people are stuck and that if they could just make sense out of their situation, they could develop simple solutions and move forward. In essence, you help people get unstuck and move forward by helping them solve their problems. And so today I've got a great guest for you. His name is Mike Zeller. He is a business architect and entrepreneur mentor who helps professionals find their zone of genius and rewrite their subconscious to fuel momentum towards life's purpose. He has mentored over 200 high level entrepreneurs from all over the world, helping add tens of millions in revenue to his clients. An entrepreneur himself, Mike has founded or partnered in over 20 ventures across multiple industries including technology, real estate, digital marketing and more. Collectively, his businesses have achieved more than 100 million in sales in the last 10 years. HE partners his business strategy with heavy emphasis on social entrepreneurism, including one venture that gave away $300,000 in cars to single mothers in need. Mike has trained under masters of the industry such as Tony Robbins, Russell Brunson, and Jay Abraham. A master NLP practitioner, he uses his core methodology to help entrepreneurs and creatives get unstuck from emotional roadblocks, to become more fully integrated and build unstoppable momentum. Mike has been featured in Business Insider, Forbes Coaches Council, Thrive Global, Huffington Post, and on Fox Radio. Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Gary, Excited to be here after that intro, I sound a lot more impressive than I feel.

Don't we all? Right, well, it sounds like you have done a lot of things and take us back through your life, maybe back to even when you were in high school. Where did you grow up? How did you get on this path of entrepreneurism and end up where you are today? Let's just start back there.

Well, at the eve of recording this session, the World Series just ended. And I was in love with baseball in high school and I was devoted to becoming a professional baseball player at one point. And so that's where self discipline and just that desire and that hunger and that fuel to challenge myself really grew. And my dad was a immigrant from Germany with an 8th grade education, moved to America not speaking a word of English post World War II. He was born in 1940, so his parents were anti Hitler, but they still had to have a picture of Hitler hanging in their house otherwise they could be arrested by the Gestapo and a lot worse could happen to him. So they had a picture of Hitler hanging in the back door in a closet. So if someone came in they could say, yes, we have our picture of Hitler in the back. I just learned this story a couple weeks ago from my dad. So pretty crazy. My dad was actually eligible. So if I go back and just some of the roots and some of the things that are imprinted upon us that you don't even realize where they come from. But my dad was actually eligible for not starvation camps. I forgot what they called it, nutrition deficient camps. Even though he was a German boy and they like were raising his parents had a general store which is like a kind of precursor to grocery stores. He came over to America with this hardiness and this resilience where they had like one serving of meat a week. They'd have potatoes and vegetables and things like that. So I'm 42, so I'm not terribly old or anything like that. When I Was growing up, he taught us a lot of that. And he taught us to be resilient and disciplined and frugal and hard working, industrious. So I got a lot of that. But he was also self employed. At the time I was growing up, he owned and raced harness horses and was one of the best in the country. And so I wanted to eventually be self employed. Eventually I knew I was meant to be an entrepreneur, thought I was going to be in the restaurants. Eventually got into real estate. Started building a little mini real estate empire. At age 31, 32, I listened to Tony Robbins Personal Power 2 again. And in it he talks about doing incantations and affirmations. And I did my seventh affirmation was that a mentor and lead some of the brightest and best people in the world. And I was like, I don't know how I'm going to do that. All I'm doing right now is real estate. But I was like, I'm supposed to write this down. And then three years later I had started at that point six more businesses and after many sabbatical in Buenos Aires, Argentina, inspired by a four hour work week and started getting tons of people reaching out for mentorship and coaching. And my first paid client was at the time they were doing 25 million a year in e. Com iheartdogs co founder of iheartdogs and loved it and felt like, all right, I need to figure out a way to make this viable and make this make sense, helping entrepreneurs grow.

So you were early on really into sports. I mean that was kind of your thing, right? Did you go off to college or. No college or.

Yeah, went to college, went to private liberal arts school and played baseball in college for a bit. Still very attuned to sports. Are you into sports, Gary?

Oh, yeah.

I'm hosting a clubhouse room next week called the Sons and daughters of Legends of Hall of Famers. So Jim Brown's daughter's coming on, Bill Russell's daughter, Sugar Ray Leonard's son, things like that. Joe Montana's son might come and play and share. I love the game of sports. I detoured a little bit.

No, no, no, no. That'll be really interesting because the pressure that's got to be on the son of the legend or the daughter of the legend has got to be intense. And I'm fortunate that I had two daughters. I didn't get to put pressure on them to be these amazing athletes because that wasn't in their, in their makeup. And I realized that quickly when I was coaching 5 year old girls soccer. And I turned to put my daughter in the game and she's down at the end of the field chasing a butterfly.

Oh, yeah.

I realized, you know what, all this pressure that I could apply to be a great athlete is not going to apply to them.

Yeah, that's funny.

What was your first business that you got into?

Besides a couple network marketing businesses? I would say, really real estate investing and build on a little real estate portfolio.

And who got you into that? Why did you pick that? Of all the things that you could have picked, why real estate investing?

One of my mentors at the time, Anthony Humphris, said he shared with me Carlton Sheets no money down program, which is basically, it says like 97% of America's millionaires made their millions in real estate. Was one of the core premises. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. But I got in the game and loved it. Loved the power of leverage and the tax write offs and all the things that comes with real estate and was still a big believer in real estate.

When I listened to your story, the quick version of it, very similar to my path. I did Tony Robbins Personal Power when I was, gosh, in my 20s. I took the no money down course. I took a lot of those same things. It'd be interesting to see if most entrepreneurs were on that same path. I saw some different multi level marketing things way back in the day and quickly learned that maybe that wasn't the best way for you probably figured out it didn't make much sense.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I didn't want everyone that I talked to to be a prospect of my downline.

You didn't want them to scatter when you walked in.

Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

What kind of real estate were you involved with?

Mostly residential. And we did a few flips, but frankly, the flips were hard. Even though Nashville's a great market, still a very hard market to make good margins on. Then I eventually owned an office building, so I had an office building that sold last year. You know, I loved investing and I still do. Besides cryptocurrency, that's the thing I really want to heavily invest in over the next 20 years as well as other companies. So.

So you kind of jump in there, figure out best way to do it, do that for a little while, and then onto the next.

Yeah. One of the things that I started noticing, especially as I reflect back, I was like, all right, why do certain, like I have four or five friends that have $100 million plus real estate portfolios and I Didn't love the game like they did, but I loved other things that they maybe don't understand or get too. And so when we go into, like, finding your genius, I think there's clues scattered throughout our lives. The challenge is most of us haven't organized and synthesized the clues that, hey, you're a genius over here. You're not so much a genius over here. In fact, you suck over here. We have some basic understanding of those things, but if you get even more precise, I think one of the fundamentals, as I look back at my entrepreneurial journey, is that I see over and over that people who accomplish extraordinary things put themselves in extraordinarily right positions. And I think there's clues in your life, clues in my life, clues in every listener's life as well.

And I bet you see scenarios where they put themselves in situations where they weren't living their genius.

Oh, yeah.

How long can somebody take that? Right? What happens to somebody when they. Well, first of all. So you just to kind of finish, you did real estate for a while and then jumped into kind of by accident. It sounds like personal growth and mentoring and helping other people achieve their success. And then in that area, that's where you learned about the zone of genius.

One of the businesses I started when I came back from Buenos Aires was a socially minded car dealership. So we had a goal that was twofold. Create the best car buying experience, most ethical, honest, straightforward, best value car buying experience in the Southeast, which we did. But then every car we sold helped us give away another car to a single mother in need. And we gave away over $300,000 worth of cars, started a digital marketing agency that was designed to help my businesses and other businesses grow and stretch. Another venture was men's fashion line, then a sustainable fashion line, then office co working space. But then I started asking myself, all right, what parts of the business am I really good at? And then I also started getting clues about what parts of the business I'm not so good at, which is some operations, legal, administrative, tax side. I hate those things. Like, it's not in my wheelhouse. I can do them. I can discipline myself, but only for so long. And then I get bored and want to go over here and create something else. And then cracks. I lost over a million dollars as well after I had all this growth, you know, doing 30 million a year in revenue. Then I personally lost over a million dollars in a pretty short time period in 2018, and kind of sideswiped me because I was playing out of my position so much. And then I realized my genius had gotten me to a certain level. But then I didn't have the right partners, collaborators, et cetera. And now I had more and more people asking as well as I was getting more advice seekers approaching me. I was like, people, I'm like, I can't tell you where and what you should do without knowing your values, without knowing your strengths, without knowing your weaknesses. And I thought all the personality tests gave us different clues. I just started creating a loosely creating a process to organize the clues and synthesize the clues. So you figured it out.

You made sense of this complex thing called what's my genius?

I think I've got the most complete process ever created for someone who is hungry to figure out their genius more precisely. I've yet to find someone that doesn't have a massive breakthrough when they do the whole thing.

How do you define your genius?

My genius is, where can I be one of the best in the world at or best in the marketplace that's deeply aligned with my values, with my life experiences, with my relationships and my strengths. So it's those four pillars, my unique talents or strengths, my key relationships, those relationships. Like some of us, we all have webs of relationships. Our network is our net worth. Some might say right then the third thing is our defining life experiences. Why does someone who goes through the same university or goes through the same experience in terms of same education or whatever do something radically different? If we look back at Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, why are they both in a race for space? They were fascinated with space in their teenage years. They wanted to do something. They dreamed of going to outer space. If we go back to our journey, Theodore Roosevelt, one of my favorite stories. Theodore Roosevelt, age, I think it was 22, 23. His wife, unfortunately, his first wife dies giving birth and his mom dies 24 hours later. And he's like, you know what? I can't take it. He was a politician at the time, a congressman or something. And he lets his aunt raise his daughter for the next six months because he's like, what am I going to do with an infant? I'm a Rough Rider type personality. And he goes out west to North Dakota and South Dakota and camps and hunts and lives in the wilderness for months. And then let's fast forward, you know, 20, 30 years later, becomes president of the U.S. he preserves the national parks, preserves more natural acreage, and is a bigger advocate for wildlife than any other president we've ever had because of those types of experiences.

So the first thing was unique talents. The second thing was your important relationships. And then the third was the life experiences. What was the fourth?

Again, it's values and passions. What do I stand for, what I stand against? What lights me up? What am I insatiably curious about? And they all give clues and then the goal is you synthesize, organize all the clues like they're scattered throughout. But if you get them all on one table or all on one worksheet, in my case, you have all these clues organized and now you can see patterns emerge. Like you've probably read Jim Collins Good to Great books and Built to Last and all that. What is it? It's basically Jim gathered a bunch of data and he assuming certain things. He had some guesses, but he looked and said, hey, what patterns are going to emerge from the data about the companies that went from good to great? There are some patterns that he didn't even expect. Same thing. Then you have greater certainty and greater clarity and whether you're one of my clients that I took through a whole day's session on it. She's a former executive of federal government, actually retiring from that in the next month. And she's had as many as 80,000 employees underneath her. She said, mike, this is one of the biggest AHAs in my 34 year career. As she went through the process, even though she's pretty self aware, she's spent tens of thousands of dollars coaching programs, read countless books, gets up at 4:30am Desert Disciplines and things like that. But now Socrates said, to know thyself is the beginning of all wisdom. If you can master yourself, you can master the game of life.

So what was the turning point for you? Why did you decide to go on this path?

I remember when I first became a man of faith in college, I became a Christian in my junior year. I remember speaking at an event and organizing an event and I remember I was like, you know what? I think my purpose in life is to unleash people's God given potential. I did ministry for a while, but I felt like I'm not supposed to be in ministry. Yeah.

What made you believe that?

It was almost like a divine download. I just had like a whisper. Sometimes also in life we get whispers, nudges, doesn't have to be audible, it's just, oh yeah, there's something meaningful here. Or I'm supposed to connect with this person. I also had a guy and when I was 21 years old, I was mentoring college students and one of the guys I was mentoring, he was like Two years younger than me, he says to me one day, he's like, mike, you're the best mentor I've ever had. I was like, wow. And his dad was a best selling leadership author. Like, his dad was a pretty legit, like way far ahead of me. And he told me I was his best mentor he's ever had. And I was like, wow, that's pretty awesome. And I was like, I'm supposed to. And then, you know, when I wrote down the affirmations, when you just get connected to your heart, connected to your spirit, you get clarity. If you're willing to still yourself, still the outside noise and listen and tune yourself and ask yourself and ask. Your body doesn't lie. Like, if I take this pen, if I take this pen right here and I put my hand down and I try and stab it, my body will not stab itself unless I've somehow bypass it. Like a Navy SEAL might be able to bypass it, but I can't bypass that very easily because our body is designed not to harm itself. So our body is also very honest. But most of us are attuned to our mind more than our body. Our mind can lie. Our mind lies all the time. We got all these word tracks, we got wounds, we got stories, we got false beliefs. I love to help people. In some meditations, we get more connected to have a claim your power meditation on YouTube that you go through it and you get more connect to yourself, your weak ass self, your most powerful self. You release the weak ass version of you from controlling, guiding your life. And it's all about asking your heart and your body, what is the name of your badass self? And letting that version lead. I've got Magic Mike and I've got Weak Ass Willie. So Magic Mike's more powerful, I promise you that.

That's so cool. So you create your own name for the badass version of yourself and then you put that one on your shoulder or what? How do you use your badass self?

We're both sports fans. We know like Kobe Bryant had black mamba. Bo Jackson had a guy named Jason from Friday the 13th. He's a nice guy off the field, but when he's on the field, he's going to run over, destroy people is how he thought. You flip into a different mentality. One of my early clients that I work with on this, she's a big Instagram influencer, had like 600,000 followers on Instagram. We sat down 20 minutes in our session, we're out in LA. She breaks down in tears she's like, mike, I'm completely stuck on her message. I'm like, crap, what am I going to do? I got a crying girl on my hands. And then I realized, oh yeah, I could take her through this process. And I took her through the process. I got her connected to Oprah Winfrey. I asked her, who do you admire? Who knows their message? Oprah Winfrey. Boom. All right? Then I had her visualize experiencing and being and delivering a message as Oprah. By the end of that, then we go back to her. She's created a whole new brainwave. You know, we've got wavelengths. The universe is made up of waves, right? Sound waves, light waves. Us as entrepreneurs, what are we? We're up and down. We're up and down. It's a roller coaster to some extent. Our women have a cycle. It's a 30 day cycle. They're up and down, up and down, right? The time of the month. They're crazy and want chocolate. So the universe is made up of waves. But the challenge is to create a new pattern or a new wave. In that law of physics, an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside source. Well, we can create new patterns, new waves, with a new perspectives. New perspectives create. Aha's. Why did Red Bull, the founder of Red Bull, discover Red Bull? When he's in Thailand, when he's tired and he has a big meeting, he asked the taxi driver pull over so he can run in and get an energy drink. And the taxi driver says, get this Red Bull, it's good. And then goes in and gets the Red Bull can or whatever with a little Red Bull on it, something similar to what it is today. And he's like, oh, this works, comes back, creates that brand, right? He was in a different brainwave, different pattern perspectives. So I help people create new patterns around finding their genius and anchoring to their most powerful identity.

And then when they have their most powerful identity, they can use that as a sounding board or they can use that as a. How do they use it once they have their badass self.

One of my clients, I'll give you an example. Renee, Bob. So she's a former army veteran or a Navy veteran, powerhouse woman, written a bunch of books. And her alter ego is Barbuda. So we were talking yesterday, and in many parts of her business she's grown, she's doubled, tripled her income since the last year of us working together. But her marketing, she hadn't made some leaps up in her marketing. I was like, Renee, who's leading your marketing department. Is it Barbuda or is it Rene? And she's like, it's not Barbuda, it's Rene. Barbuda leads with power, magnificence, strength, courage. She doesn't play small. You have a different energy and the beauty of the human mind that is different from the animal kingdom. I remember when my dad made us watch animal shows and you see like a wildebeest getting caught by some lions and then all of a sudden it somehow escapes, escapes the jaws of the lion and runs off. And the lion's too tired to chase it down. Well, you're like, two minutes later, it's eating grass. You're like, Mr. Wildebeest, what the heck's wrong with you? You were just in the jaws of a lion and now you're eating grass. We wouldn't do that. I mean, if we almost die, we're not eating a sandwich two minutes later.

Because our minds are different animals, kingdoms, their minds are designed to release energy faster, right? Studying trauma a lot, Healing Trauma is a great book that talks a little bit about this. Us as humans, we hold on to it, but we also have the superpower of. How can we have the superpower of we can transport our minds into a different space with imagination and creativity. And if we can do that, then we will lead and create from a radically different space. And our marriages can be different, our relationships can be different, and we unlock our divine human potential a different way. And that's why I think this higher version of ourself that's within us is actually the real version. Like, sometimes we're like, oh, if I step up here and I imagine myself there, that's the imposter. No, your current reality is most likely your imposter. So what if we flip the perspective? What if my current reality, the one that wants to play small, the one that wants to hide, that wants to not go for it, what if that version is the false version?

And so once you have that defined what the real version of you is and named, then you can step into that.

What I do is I have people write out, how does this version of you walk? How does this version of you talk? What does this version of you wear? Are they wearing hand me downs pre owned clothes? Are they wearing Gucci or what are they wearing? John Verbatos. What type of music does that version of you listen to? And you start getting associated like, I start my day off. You do affirmations. I start my day off literally with this. I am Magic Mike. I am a Wealth magnet. I am attracting, earning, and saving millions of dollars. I am worthy of extraordinary. So I just start off with, like, I've got 2 minutes and 22 seconds of affirmations of declaring I am. I am, even though some of those things have not happened fully yet. But I'm speaking where I want to go. You know, our words are our commands. So I speak those into existence based on my zone of genius. Partly as well, because then they're in alignment. Because I'm designed to be a creator, not accumulator, like Warren Buffett. I use the wealth dynamics test as one of my favorite personality test and shows you your natural pathway to wealth. So if I'm creating, building in alignment, and the powerful phrase I am subtly commands your body to move in that direction. Right. And with energy. With music. I like energy. And music changes our brain waves as well.

So tell us about Magic Mike versus Weak Willy. Or was that what you called him?

Weak Ass Willie.

Yeah, Weak Ass Willie. When did that transition happen from Weak Ass Willie to Magic Mike, and what was that like for you?

I would say both of them still show up. Weak Ass Willie. Like, when I lost a lot of money and then I had all these people I had to pay and all these things, man, I had some shame. I had some significant shame around that. So I had my tail between my legs. I'm not going to take care of what I need to take care of if Weak Ass Willie is leading my life, right? So I started creating that alter ego of Magic Mike because I had a client call me Magic Mike because of the magic I was creating in her life. And so I said, you know what? All right, what does Magic Mike do? How does he lead? And then how can he show up more and more? And then before I go into meetings, before I go into podcast interviews, before I do this or this, I'm like, all right, do I want Magic Mike to lead or do I want Weak Ass Willie? And then I'll say thank you. When Weak Ass Willie shows up, I'll literally say, thank you for sharing. You're a good desire. Thank you for. It's always for protection, wanting to keep me from harm. So I'm like, all right, I see you. I hear you. But I've got to advance. I've got to be on the offensive. I've got to lead. I can't retreat. Thank you, Magic Mike. Take the reins, drive the car, drive the bus in my life. Let's roll.

Which is very much like sports, right? Make it.

And it's really goes down into visualization and commanding, reinforcing and not letting thought or pattern that doesn't serve who you actually really are and how you want to show up stay in your mind long. We all have them come in, but do we let them build a nest in a home?

I can't versus I can, right?

Yeah.

I was a world champion in racquetball. And in every level we went through or I went through at every stage, I faced the. Am I good enough? Am I really good enough?

Yeah.

And you have to overcome that.

By believing it. Right. By changing your. What worked when you were at a lower level does not work when you get to the next level, which does not work when you get to the next level. So you've got to reinvent. Reinvent, reinvent.

Yeah, exactly. You've had to do that a few times in your career and I imagine you've gotten closer and closer as well to your genius and to your purpose. And there's always more to unpack, but it's using the lessons of our wins and our failures.

What I like about what you've done is that you've kind of just figured it out. You've codified what people were doing that found success versus what people were doing that didn't find success. And you said, look, this is what these people are doing. Let me just show you what the heck they're doing. So it makes sense to you and then you can go do it.

Yeah. And it's do it in your own unique way, in your own unique path in a way. The other thing that's cool about this process is when you do it now, you're going to have even more deep alignment, which if you're resolved and convicted in your spirit, guess what? You show up more courageously. You show up with greater confidence. You show up with greater commitment. So the conviction, it all starts with clarity. It's the first of the five C's. Greater clarity leads to greater confidence. Greater confidence leads to greater conviction. With a greater conviction, we show up with more courage and then we make higher level commitments to ourself and others.

Clarity leads to confidence, which leads to conviction, which leads to courage, which leads to commitments.

Really good. I'm sure there's a lot of people listening right now that are in that stage themselves where they're making that shift the transition from what they were doing to what they want to do. And it's scary. I mean, it is. It's sometimes easier just to write it out. Right. Play small.

So the first step now, if you're talking to them right now, they're listening and they're teetering on should I go for it? Should I not go for it? What is the first step they should take?

I think anyone should take. Socrates, one of the wisest men who ever lived, mentored Plato and Aristotle, who gave us, in essence, Western civilization and the philosophy of democracy and the capitalistic system as well in human growth, human potential. Socrates said, to know thyself is the beginning of all wisdom. King David said it's better to have self control than to conquer a city in Proverbs 16:32. Another wise man, Dee Hawk, the founder of Visa. When he started writing for Harvard Business Review, he found the very best leaders in the world did something that ordinary leaders did not.

And that was that they focus more than 50% of their leadership energy on leading themselves. Back to what I said earlier of around extraordinary results are predicated not necessarily by the most extraordinary people, but people being in extraordinarily right positions. So you think of a great sports team, they're extraordinarily aligned. Why will the Brooklyn Nets probably never win an NBA championship with Kevin Durant, James Harden at least currently? Consistent how it's consistent. They don't have a complimentary team. They got two great stars, but they're not. It's not aligned with the rest of the team. Right. So extraordinary success comes down to people being in extraordinarily right positions. So if you get yourself more in the right position. I had another client go through all the tests and the course before I had the book out, and she's like, mike, I would have doubled my salary if I'd gone through this first because I would have had so much greater clarity around where I kick butt and I would have asked for more. And now she renegotiated her salary after being at the job for a month. But figure out who you are, where you're amazing, because then you can put yourself in a position where you can succeed the most. Obviously pick up the book because it guides you through the whole process. But go through the personality test. The reason I take people through five personality tests is they all give you different clues, different. They measure different behaviors, different strengths. And then doing the other inventories around relationships and defining life moments, they also give you other layers of clues. And the more layers of clues, the more patterns you will see.

And then once you know yourself, then making decisions is easier. Then you have clarity, confidence, conviction, courage. It all makes sense.

Oh, good.

And so you know what we believe. That's exactly what we believe. By the way, that's right in line with. We believe that the first step is self awareness, and the first step in self awareness is knowing your why. Because once you know your why, all the rest makes sense. All the rest of it will fit together. Like in your case, we know you're somebody who believes in making sense of complex and challenging things. You've done that in every area of your life all the way along, from being the guy that helped people through their problems when you were young to the person that's continually doing it now. And you did it in real estate, and you did it all the way along your journey. And knowing that we could predict that, you're eventually going to figure something special out there, you took something that is complex and challenging and overwhelming. And I have no idea what to do. And I don't know where to turn. And I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. And you said, here, let me just hold your hand for a second. Here's where you go. Yeah, here's your step. Figure yourself out, and then we'll figure the rest out.

What's the best piece of advice that you've ever been given or that you ever gave someone?

Something that really changed my world. I was 19 years old and I went to Peter Lowe's Success seminar. I heard guys like Zig Ziglar and Colin Powell and all those kind of legends of afar. And one of them said, hey, spend 30 minutes a day reading. Do it in the first part of your day, do it in the morning. That way you start your day off with some fuel in the tank, you put some deposits in your bank account. I've done that in every season of life since then, and I've read 1500 books now. I love learning and growing as a result. I can honestly say I've mastered a lot of different subjects. Another guy, Brian Tracy, that I went to when I was 20 years old, in the middle of a finals week at his seminar, he said, hey, if you read a book a month in your chosen field, you'll be an expert in three years. So that's 36 books. And I was like, I don't want to wait three years. A little more impatient. And I was like, I'm going to master a subject in one year. And so the first one I mastered and worked on was leadership and then sales and marketing, spirituality, relationships, human psychology, all those others. So choosing a field and becoming a bona fide expert really goes far. And you want to learn and lean into that and become a master. Don't be a dabbler. I mean, you can dabble in some things. That's okay. That's experimentation. But choose a handful of things to become a master at. And then once you master something else, if you want to go explore something else and master something else, master that. But top 1 percenters earn disproportionately more than everyone else. And we all can be a 1 percenter. If that's 36 books, you can read 36 books in a subject and not just taking puff yourself up, but apply it. That would be my best advice I've ever received.

I love that one of my mentors says it this way. He says, learn less and study more.

That's good.

Yeah. This is pretty much what you said. You don't need 500 books on 500 subjects. Take one subject and go 500 books deep and then become the master. If there's people that are listening and they're like, man, I love what Mike had to say all in. How do I get a hold of him? How do I work with him? What's the best way to connect with you? What would work best for you?

Yeah, thanks for asking, Gary. So if you want a free six step guide to finding your genius, I've got a free six step guide. You can just text genius u as in the letter u genius you 247-4747 and again that's geniusu to 474747 and you'll get that a link to opt in and get that PDF and then also geniuswithinbook.com it's on Amazon, of course, Themike Zeller on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, et cetera and Mike Zeller.com as well. Pleasure being on your show, Gary. Love your approach and excited for this next chapter of your life as well. It's going to be fun.

I'm so glad you are here. Thank you for taking the time and I look forward to staying in touch. And as you come through Albuquerque, definitely look me up. We'll go get some Mexican food here.

That'd be great. I love it.

Thanks, man. So in our last segment of Guess the why, I want us to think about Patrick Mahomes, the quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs who won the Super Bowl a couple years ago and who had a great year last year and not such a great year in this current year, but I'm sure it's going to end better for him. What do you think? Patrick Mahomes. Why is he's the guy that can throw the sidearms. He's the guy that can run really well, passes really well, just seems to think faster than everybody else. He always seems one step ahead. And so for me, I think that his why is the same as our guest Mike Zeller, which is to make sense of the complex and challenging. So much comes his way, but he quickly synthesizes it, quickly gets on the right path, quickly makes a decision and quickly makes it happen. And that's what people with the why of makes sense do. So I think Patrick Mahomes why is make sense of the complex and challenging. So thank you all for listening. If you've not yet discovered your why, you can do so@whyinstitute.com, use the code PODCAST50 and you can get it for half price. If you love the beyond, you'd why Podcast. Please don't forget to subscribe below. Leave us a review and a rating on whatever platform you're using to listen to our podcast. Thank you and I will see you and hear you, or you'll hear me next week. Have a great week.

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 why institute.com and discover your why today. Remember, 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.