A conversational YouTube transcript (Denzel Rodriguez interviewing a guest) exploring how early-life hunger, upbringing, and resource scarcity create drive and entrepreneurial success. The speakers contrast innate drive with environmental factors, share personal anecdotes (food stamps, selling shoes, fixing cars), and discuss the guest’s current work helping entrepreneurs with practical roadmaps to scale efficiently.
Chapters
So talk to us about in and you can share what you're currently working on now in your business and how you are, are serving. But the first question I have for you is how do you make your money? Right. How do you generate value in the marketplace? Get paid? Right. I want to start there, and then I want to kind of peel back a few layers as to like, how did you get to this point? Because there's a mindset that comes with it and how you were able to catch on to it at such an early age. Because I. I'm talking to clients that are in their 40s, 50s, even 60s, and a light bulb went off after they watched one of my videos or someone else's, and they're now stepping into either the world of entrepreneurship or anything outside of a normal W2.
So I feel like I was blessed in that. I mean, I had a job in high school, you know, I was a basketball scorekeeper. But even in middle school, I was selling Jordan sneakers, which at the time were like collectibles. And it was a huge deal. So I would, like, meet grown men. I was 13, flipping shoes and making deals. I'd be like, hey, dad, drop me a McDonald's. I got to make a deal. And I would, like, sniff the shoe. I would be like, like, okay, the shoes are. They're legit. You know, it's. It would be like a movie. It's. It was funny, but it was great experience. And I think I always had that hustle and that drive from, yeah, a very early age, but I just jumped in when I was 18.
Would you say you were born with it? Do you think it's something you're born with or.
I think it's something that is more likely in. Yes. There's a certain innate drive, I think, in hunger that people have. Yeah. But I also think that upbringing is big. I mean, and I don't. I have two, you know, fluffy dogs. I don't have any human kids yet. I have some fur babies. Fur dogs. But as a parent, a future parent, and you know, my dad, my stepmom, mom, my mother in law, now my father in law, like, I have a lot of great role models and examples and I would say the number one commonality is that if you just give a kid everything, like why, how and why would they have hunger? Because hunger is. You're. You're starving, maybe. Right?
Like literally in some cases.
Literally.
Yeah, right.
Like literally not knowing where the next meal is coming from. I grew up on food stamps. Growing up sometimes and sleeping on the floor, no mattress, like literally no pillow, nothing. Right. And like, just different situations like that, like that can't leave you to a certain extent, even as you have some level of success. So I think yes, there is a certain born innate drive or hunger. But I also think that a lot of people maybe have had that upbringing, but they kind of just leave it in the past and they try not to think about it. But I think looking back, sometimes it can give you motivation of, hey, like, I've been through a lot, I've overcame because I think when sometimes people become adults and maybe they get a little comfortable, they get a job or they start a little business and they achieve a certain level of comfort, they can get too comfortable and forget where they came from. And sometimes it's like, hey, like, I'm able to overcome challenges. I was able to grow and figure things out. And again, when I was hungry and I had, I was resourceful. Even though I didn't have resources, I was able to make things happen. But I think as people get comfortable, sometimes they feel like they don't have that ability anymore. But I think again, if, you know, if you just give a kid or give somebody something and they don't have to do anything in return, that's where I feel like it's environment where I wasn't given things. I had to earn it and go figure it out. I bought my first car. It was a piece of junk I fixed, kept having issues. I sold it to fund my business. So when you have no safety net behind you, when your back is fully against the wall.
Yeah. And you can only go forward, magical.
Things start to just happen. I say magical because like, you're the fairy that figure things out. You're like, oh, well, I have no other option besides success and figuring it out. I have no safety net. So I think that that in itself is a blessing. So again, I think a lot of people, they've had challenges in their life, but they then over time just get a little too comfortable and forget that, hey, like, I'm capable, I'm strong, I can make things happen.
Yeah. So then fast forward to now. It's 2025. You're running a business. How do you currently serve people today? What do you, what do you do now?
So I think now I tried my best to give entrepreneurs, business owners, a roadmap from where they're at right now and where they can get to. And of course, how do we make that happen in the middle? Because I think a lot of people have a big vision. They have goals. They feel like they can do something, but they don't know the steps on how to do it. It's like building a house. A lot of people can say, oh, yeah, I can design it. And, like, it's going to have five bedrooms and a game room. And they can think of, like, the fun stuff, but it's like, okay, so now go do that. It's like, well, that's kind of complex. You know, there's permits and foundation, windows, drywall, fans, electricity. Like, I don't know how to do that. So I think that's like building a business. There's so many little steps that you and I kind of figured it out on our own to a certain extent, and it worked out. But we were young, didn't have a lot of responsibility. We had time to spend because we didn't have money to really get that, like, the help that we really needed. Whereas a lot of my clients, they have maybe the resources. They don't want to waste time. They don't want to try. They want to get the proven plan, get the accountability, get the help to say, let's bridge this gap as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible. And again, that's why they have the resources, so they can save the time. And I learned this actually from a friend of ours, Stephen Gardner, because last week we went to Disney World. And in Disney World, a lot of people don't know the wait time for, like, a general ticket can be three hours long for one ride. And that's.
That goes the whole day.
How they have the whole day with one or two rides. Right. So we're talking about it's time or money. Like, people are spending one or the other. If people have money, they can do the VIP tour where they go in the back and they wait one minute, but they're spending a lot of money to get a lot of time back. People that don't have that money, they have to spend the time to have the same experience. So I look at starting or growing a business like that. You can invest your time, not get a coach, not get a mentor. Figure it out on your own, and you could make it happen. But you're going to make a lot of mistakes that are avoidable, and it's going to take more time inherently. But again, maybe that's what works for some people like us. But a lot of people have the money and say, let me trade this money for getting my time back, getting a proven, clear system, and again, just overall giving themselves the best shot at success in less time, so that's essentially what we do.
