Eben Pagan | Rewiring Success: How to Think, Grow, and Thrive

You know, as you create a product or make a website or, you know, go out into the world and start doing sales and marketing or put yourself out there on a podcast. Each one of them, it feels like, oh, my gosh, this is so huge. And, you know, if this doesn't work, it might ruin everything. But what you realize is that it's two steps forward and then one step back. Success is never a straight line, okay? It goes up and it goes down, and it goes up and it goes down. And it's that ability, when it's down, to remember I need to just keep doing the basics. I need to just stick with the fundamentals, keep showing up every day, and that eventually that this is going to go in the right direction.

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Moll, and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness, and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started.

What if I told you that success isn't about luck or talent, but about mindset strategy and the right relationships? Today, I sit down with Evan Pagan, a New York Times bestselling author and branding expert who has been a game changer in online education. In this conversation, Evan breaks down the psychology of success, the mindset shifts that separate those who struggle from those who thrive, and the hidden keys to creating wealth and opportunity. We explore how he built his first online business from his bedroom, why confidence and resilience are more important than raw talent, and how you can leverage AI and digital marketing to take your business to the next level. If you've ever wondered why some people seem to have the golden touch in business while others stay stuck, you won't want to miss this episode. Get ready for a powerful conversation on on breaking through limitations, redefining your success, and creating a business and a life that's truly on your terms. Let's get started. My name is Dr. Fleet Molly, and I'm thrilled to be here today with Evan Pagan. Welcome, Evan.

Hey, Fleet. Hey. Great to see you again, man.

Well, I've dreamed of doing this for a long time. I've been following your work ever since I began thinking about how to offer summits and other courses and stuff online. I think I started exploring your training some eight or nine years ago, and you've always been a great inspiration so I've dreamed it a day of doing it as soon as I'm thrilled it's here. So in your work, you emphasize the power of reframing and shifting perspectives. So what are some of the core beliefs that people need to transform to really, you know, step more into abundance thinking and not limit ourselves in terms of what we might be able to accomplish for ourselves and our family in terms of building financial freedom?

Well, you said there this idea of shifting perspectives and looking at things through different frames. And I think that most of us have this unconscious belief that we need to look at reality one way. And honestly, I've lost the ability to just look at reality one way. I don't know how to have only one perspective anymore, and I just don't think that it's productive. And so I think the first answer is just whenever you're looking at any kind of situation, whether it's an opportunity, whether it's a challenge, whether it's a conflict, whether you're trying to figure out how to sell a product, or you're trying to figure out how to have a relationship with a person, that you really need to look at it from two or three perspectives minimum. And you really need to not get stuck anywhere. You know, you got to look at it from your perspective, from the other person's perspective, from the company's perspective, from the client's perspective, from your partner's perspective. And this is actually a lot harder than it sounds, because I think it was Keats, the poet, he called it the negative capability, where you have to try to turn off your ego, you know, kind of your system running your system, and you have to turn on and activate, kind of simulate or emulate another person's perspective. It turns out that's quite a trick. But it's been extremely valuable to me, you know, in my relationship as a parent, writing copy, doing, marketing, creating products, because the more you can really get inside of the perspective of another person or a group of people, the more you can then communicate from that perspective or create from that perspective or create for that perspective. So I'd say that that kind of limiting belief, that's an unconscious one, that I just need to look at things from my perspective, that we really have to be able to look from multiple perspectives and not get stuck in any of them.

Well, that's fascinating. I have a strong background in integral work, Ken Wilber's work and so forth. And they talk a lot about multi perspectival awareness. And they go beyond second, third person, even the fourth and then they get into talking about six, I don't know about the sixth, seventh, eighth dimension, but it's enough to be. Put ourselves in somebody else's shoes, at least, right? And, or think of groups of people. And that seems to be critical to being able to be successful. But even in terms of focusing on ourselves when we're, you know, stuck in our own perspective, maybe full of a lot of limiting core beliefs that keep us from taking action or doing the kind of things that could change our situation in terms of improving our career, our job or income, or starting a business, or improving our business. And I wonder if you could talk about some of those limiting core beliefs that so many of us suffer from that can just kind of. We may even be trying to get somewhere, but we keep bouncing up in that. Unconsciously we drop back down because it's like we believe we're not supposed to get any better than that.

Yeah, Two things come to mind. Fleet. Years ago, I heard Dan Kennedy say something interesting, right? He's a legend in terms of direct response marketing. He said they should have a national bring a poor person to work day. And every year, right? Like every rich person should have to bring a poor person with them to work just so that a person that doesn't make as much money could see what the rich person does at work. And so that they could say, oh, this is what you do.

That's.

I could do that. They could see that it's not like magic, if that makes sense, you know, And I'll say that this is certainly true for me. I grew up in the backwoods of Oregon. I had these hippie parents who kind of dropped out and, you know, moved out to the country. And I grew up on a farm and we were on, you know, welfare and food stamps and all that stuff. When I was growing up, I never had new clothes or any of these kinds of things. And it wasn't until I got into my 20s, I had dropped out of high school, I dropped out of college to go on tour with a rock band of all things. In my 20s, I just said, man, I gotta go figure out how to make money, you know, making $10 an hour. My manual labor job isn't doing it for me. But I didn't know where to start because I just didn't. I had no resources. I didn't know anyone that was successful. I didn't know anyone that was self made or rich, really. And so I went into real estate and you know, I thought, okay, well, maybe I'll go into real Estate. And it looked like everyone drove a Lexus and, you know, wore a suit. So I thought, maybe if I go into real estate, they'll buy me a Lexus and give me his suit. But it turned out that wasn't true either. And so here I was with a ponytail, driving a two door Camaro trying to sell real estate. And that was, you know, that wasn't working. And ultimately I went to work with a man named Joe Stump, who's a real estate trainer that some people might know. He's an amazing teacher still to this day, one of the greatest speakers and teachers, and he was an early teacher and mentor. The point is, at some point I started meeting really successful people in the industry, in real estate and mortgage. And then I started going riding around in their car with them. And all of a sudden I'm riding around these fancy Mercedes and nice cars and going to nice restaurants with people. And mostly they were taking me out because I was, you know, a broke kid at this point. But once I got to go in there and see what they were doing and then see that these were just people that had figured out how to do a thing that made them a lot more money than what most other people were making, something really clicked for me there. You know, something really happened. And so when it comes to like limiting beliefs and changing beliefs and so forth around this, I think you really got to do what it takes to go and meet people who are successful and talk to them. The good news is, you know, you can go to a trade event or an industry event, or just go where people are speaking. And oftentimes you can meet them out in the hallway and you can sit in the front row, you can go talk to them, meet them at the cocktail party. I've met all kinds of people at events, from famous artists to Steve Jobs to Bill Gates. I've met freaking everybody over the years by just going to events. And it's incredible because once you talk to one of these people and you have a conversation with them, something happens where you just realize, oh, this is a person. Oh, right. This is a person who's actually just really passionate and really trying to figure this thing out. So that's one. And then the second part of the answer is, when you go to the next level in life, okay, when you actually transform, when you go from caterpillar to butterfly, you have to change your role, you have to change your identity, you have to change your beliefs, you have to change the function that you have in the world. You have to change how you Create value, how you get paid, they all change. You know, if you've ever read Robert Kiyosaki's work in Rich Dad, Poor dad and Cash Flow Quadrant, right, He has his four quadrants and he talks about going from employee to self employed to business owner to entrepreneur, or I'm sorry, to business owner to investor. Right, business owner, entrepreneur. And then what he talks about here is that each one is a. It's a different level. It's a whole different set of like different mindsets, different approaches, different things you have to do. If you try to be an employee but own a business that's not going to work because it's a different to higher order of skills, it's orders beyond. And so I think we all just have to be aware that there's always another level. You know, there's always another level that we can get to, but that level looks at things differently. It's not playing this game anymore. It's like in math you do addition and subtraction, then once you learn that level you can go to multiplication and division. And then once you learn multiplication and division, right, then you can go up and start doing things with variables and it's a different order of operation. And if we remember this, then we can be asking, what is that next level that I can't even see right now, that I can't even comprehend? And we can go try to meet people who are playing that game. And then when you do, you know, the world opens up to you and the world of opportunity opens up for you.

Wow, I love that answer. You know, I grew up, I'm a generation ahead of you. So I grew up with parents who came out of the Depression and then World War II and a lot of fear based psychology. And my family had a small business and I don't know if it happened, maybe when I was a very young child this happened. They took some risks and it involved one of my uncles who was in the business. And then it might have been before I was like, but it ended up in receivership for many years, which held the company way back. And, and so there was this idea of don't take risk, be a small company, be safe. And you know, and they presented that whole kind of world of success out there was this kind of soulless world. And you know, and so I reacted against the whole thing, became a hippie like your parents. So then I embraced all that and it took me a while to work my way through all these different limiting mindsets. But once I did get out in the world and start meeting very successful people. One, I found out they weren't all jerks. They weren't all, you know, selfish people stepping on other people to become wealthy.

And.

And also, they weren't any, really any different than I was. They were just passionate and working hard, and that changed everything for me. Yeah, absolutely. So I think what sometimes holds people back, like in my family, you have a major setback. So then the message is, oh, don't take risks. Right. And so I wonder about, you know, how we can deal with financial setbacks and financial challenges. So how can we reframe those so that they could be a catalyst to go to the next level? Because when you read the stories of very successful people, there's usually quite a number of failures or setbacks in their origin story. So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.

Well, as you mentioned earlier there, in a past life, I was a dating guru. And one of the things, because I taught a lot of single men, a lot of single, kind of socially awkward men who are scared of women and so forth, and I certainly was as well, by the way. I didn't have a girlfriend until I was, like, 18 years old. I never had a girlfriend in school. And I just started to accept, like, oh, girls don't like me. You know, maybe I'll never have a girlfriend. Like. Like that kind of thing. And then I went and I kind of learned how the whole dating world works. And I learned. I mean, I learned that you can learn. And then I realized something, which is that, I mean, especially as a man, and I know women, you know, have these same kinds of things, but especially as a man, and especially if you're kind of insecure and socially awkward at every step along the way, like going over and talking to a girl or asking for her phone number or asking, you know, if she wants to go out with you at some point, or going on a date or kissing or any of these things, at each one, it feels like there's this huge risk, right? It feels like you're standing on the edge of a cliff and you're taking a risk, and if you miss, you're going to fall over and die, and you're going to go all the way back to the beginning and, like, you're going to lose everything. Well, that's also the way it feels in business. You know, as you create a product or make a website or, you know, go out into the world and start doing sales and marketing or put yourself out there on a podcast. Each one of them, it Feels like, oh my gosh, this is so huge. And you know, if this doesn't work, it might ruin everything. But what you realize is that just like in dating and relationships and you know, just like in business, that, and I used to teach this in dating. It's two steps forward and then one step back, and then it's two steps forward and then one step back and there's two steps forward and one step back. And that success is never a straight line.

Okay?

It goes up and it goes down and it goes up and it goes down. And it's that ability when it's down to remember I need to just keep doing the basics. I need to just stick with the fundamentals, keep showing up every day and that eventually that this is going to, you know, go in the right direction. And so that helps me out a lot.

Fleet.

I mean, one of my kind of core values is persistence is to just stay in there. And whenever I'm going through really hard stuff when it just sucks, you know, things aren't working. We've been trying stuff, nothing's been working for months. We lose a lot of money on something, whatever. And you know, and I'm at that place where I want to give up. I'm just like, you know, I want to throw in the towel right now. That's when I always remind myself, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to throw in the towel right now. I'm going to stay at it. This is the place where everybody throws in the towel. This is where everybody gives up and I'm going to win because I'm going to not stop. I'm just going to keep going until I figure this out. And that served me really well.

It's taken me a while to get my mind back in business and wealth because I'm still stuck in my adolescence. I've got flashbacks. When you were using your analogy of that, I was re traumatized thinking of all the times when I ventured to make the call or ask the girl out and all of that.

Yeah, exactly.

So you were kind of describing this pathway anyway. But I wonder if you could talk about the role of confidence and self esteem in being able to make good decisions and make smart decisions and keep coming back and not give up. How do we kind of build that up over time?

You know, I was very fortunate to have known and did a little work with Dr. Nathaniel Brandon when he was alive and he, you know, he wrote the kind of the seminal books, you know, Six Pillars of Self Esteem and so forth. Around self esteem. So the way I think about it, right, so confidence is this feeling that you have, right? It's more like it's like a real time feeling that you have. You know, self esteem we could almost call like meta confidence. I guess that would be a good way of thinking about it. Dr. Brandon, he defined self esteem as two things. One, confidence in your ability to cope with the challenges that life throws at you and then your feeling that you deserve happiness. So if you've got those two things, if you've got confidence in your ability to handle the challenges and then you feel that you deserve happiness, then he said you have self esteem. And so self esteem is built by putting yourself in situations that are challenging and then facing them and surviving basically so that you develop this more generalized confidence, a higher level confidence that whatever happens, you're going to be okay. You know, and I'm actually at the place now where, you know, I'm 53 years old, I'm going to turn 54 soon. I have a wife, I have an 11 year old daughter, I have, you know, multiple businesses and you know, so forth and so on. I got just, you know, I've been through a lot of stuff in my life, been through challenges, my family and you know, my friends, so forth and so on. And I really legitimately feel that when something happens to me, as long as it doesn't take me out, even if it's really hard, I basically know while I'm going through it, you know, this is, you know, this sucks, it's painful, but I'm learning something here that's going to be extremely valuable to me in the long run. You know, there have been a few things that have happened in my life where, you know, that even that has been hard to remember, that it's somehow someday it's going to be okay. But I do, I just remind myself of that. And another one, I would say that's been useful. You, this is a little bit tangential to this, but you know, I've also learned that when there are upsets or misunderstandings or there's friction in relationships that I used to really get upset at that stuff if somebody got mad at me or you know, we got into an argument or something like this, I would be distraught and upset about it for a long time and worried about what they would think. But now what I realized is if there's an upset or a misunderstanding or some type of a difference or disagreement, I literally, my mind just goes, okay, well you know, this is painful, it's hard, but it's the opportunity to have a better relationship with this person because this gives me the opportunity to go. To get to know them better, to. Right. To work through this with them, to have the kind of relationship because you, you know, if you look at the relationships you have that are long term and that are strong, they've been through challenging things and then you worked through them together, so it's kind of that same thing. But in your relationship to the world, you know, when you go through hard things and you work through them, you figure out your way around them, you solve complex problems, you go through things that are hard, and you stay in there, you build trust with yourself, you build a reputation with yourself that you can be relied on to hang in there even through hard things. And so I think that builds confidence and self esteem.

I love that expression you just used, building trust with oneself. I think by hanging in there with tough situations, you build that trust and that you build this confidence through, you know, through the way we deal with challenges, really tough challenges. I like that a lot of our audience is probably familiar with my backstory that I spent time in prison back in the 90s and the second half of the 80s and the 90s. You know, it was during that time that I discovered that even in that situation, I was okay. I found a way to be okay and that I was fundamentally okay. And. And, you know, I also, you know, had aspirations would I be able to do post prison and things like that, but I actually was able to discover some level of okayness even in the midst of that. I'm wondering, you know, in when we do have setbacks or experience failures, if there's some way to find, you know, get in touch with some unconditional okayness that, you know, on some level I'm still okay. And yeah, I'll build back. And I have aspirations to do this in the future. And so it seems to me there's these two mixes of confidence. One that will be based on being able to do something new and get to a new place and get to a better place, perhaps, but also one that even in the midst of the worst failures and challenges, I'm still fundamentally okay as a human being.

Yeah, you know, what comes to mind is I'm a musician and I'm a guitar player, and the music was great in the 80s. You know, it was amazing. It was this renaissance and maybe toward the end of the 80s you could see where things were going and you knew that the 90s weren't going to be very good and you escaped Maybe you just went in there to you. I think you took the right amount of time off Fleet. It was the right period musically.

I didn't know where you were going with that, but for me it was the 70s and 80s. Yeah, great music. Well, there's ways to, you know, both realize that by facing a challenge and then building back, we can develop a confidence and a trust in ourselves that even in the face of challenges and failures, we, you know, but also to even find in the midst of that some internal okay or some place in ourselves that where we're okay with who we are. So maybe it's a mix of unconditional and conditional competence and unconditional and conditional self esteem and so forth.

Well, I mean, look, I kind of tend to think that we are so spoiled at this point. We have so much material abundance, you know, I mean, up until, I don't know, 100 years ago, most of us died in childhood. You know, like up until not that long ago, four out of five of us were dead before we were even, you know, adults. Like, there are pictures with families with like dead kids in the picture because they'd keep them around suffering that, you know, took place. Everybody lived on less than a dollar a day up until, you know, again, this industrial revolution and everything. And so watching the level of, you know, I can relate to all of this stuff too. I'm not like criticizing other people, but just how like a little setback can take somebody out, you know, a little upset, a little thing that happens at work. Jonathan Haidt writes about, like the coddling of the, you know, kind of the American or like the modern mind and the heart. So I think that on the one hand we need to remember that we are strong. Like, we are really, really, really strong individuals can make it through anything. You know, you read about people that have gone through wars and then, you know, come out the other side and then gone on to live happy, productive lives, you know, or, you know, like Viktor Frankl can come out and not only live her life, but then take all of it and, you know, create a whole body of work that inspires people. We have to remember that. And I honestly, I think we need to just put ourselves through harder things. I mean, I think we need to deliberately go out there and do things that are hard. Been listening to Jordan Peterson a lot over the last few years. His biblical series is just an absolutely stunning, you know, piece of work. And, you know, and I highly recommend it. But what's interesting about. And he's also, you know, he's Very eccentric and so forth too. So, you know, whatever. But the point is, you know, he's a practicing clinical psychologist or he was a practicing for decades. And, you know, he's got his 10,000 hours in the clinic as a clinician working with people. And he's also, he just has an encyclopedic knowledge of psychology and psychophysiology and so forth. And he points out very clearly what we need to do is go and expose us, expose ourselves to the things that we fear on our terms, right? Because what happens is if you don't go and deliberately and intentionally and consciously face each thing that you fear, expose yourself to it on your terms, when you're ready for it, experience the stress and then adapt to it and acclimate that what's going to happen is at some point in your life, one of those things is going to show up in your life that you fear and you're not going to be ready for it. And it's going to be on its terms and not yours. And it's going to be like getting T boned at an intersection. It's going to broadside you and it has the, you know, the possibility of creating a domino effect and destroying your life. Because when you're not ready for it, right, and you've been hiding from it, and so part of it, you know, is just build resilience by deliberately going and facing the things that you fear. Go and do it. And I think that building a business is like a masterclass in this, okay? It's like getting an advanced degree in toughening yourself up because there's almost nothing that will accelerate you on the road of personal development. Show you your shadow, put all your fears right in front of you, you know, terrify you in a million ways, show you all your failures, your inadequacies, like starting a business, it just roots them all out. The only thing better is getting married.

Okay?

The only thing better at all is getting married. But if you do both of those, you can really accelerate, you know, your resilience building. But go do it, man. Face your fears. And then when they come up, go face them. Don't run from them. Say, wow. Opportunity to build strength.

Wow, that's great. It's really both a challenging and empowering message. And I love, I think in Jordan's book the twelve Principles or something like that one chapter or something like, don't interrupt your kids when they're skateboarding. And I think the idea was something like that. But the idea is, you know, we need to experience the Bumps and bruises, like growing up, if you bubble, you know, helicopter, parent your kids. And we have incredible resilience and I think we need to really develop greater and greater access to that. And I think culturally it's important that we do that. I agree with Jonathan Haidt that we have our work there culturally to toughen up a little bit. Not in a non compassionate way, but just to access the resilience that we have as human beings so we can all shine and contribute what we can contribute to life.

So you talked about compassion. Okay. I really think it's very important to understand that. I also mean, you know, we need to challenge ourselves at an 8, 9 or 10, but we also have to have empathy, caring, compassion, sensitivity for ourselves and for others as well. But kind of in the same way, you know, when you go to the gym, you don't go into the gym and go like, why did they make all these weights so heavy? You know, you don't go over to the machine and like, oh, oh, go over to the front desk person and go, why is that so heavy? Why did they do that? You know, it's like, no, no, no, you go in there, you're not going to the spa, you're going to the gym, as my wife likes to say. And you lift the weight that challenges you and you push yourself to the edge because that's what goes and tells the muscle to get stronger, you know. But then you go home and you relax, you take a bath, you know, steam in the stout, you know, you get a good night's sleep, you know, get a massage if, you know, can. It's like you treat yourself with care, you take really good care of your body, but you also really challenge it. You build both of those muscles. So, yeah, I guess I want to make sure that I, it doesn't come across. Some of the people that are out there teaching are basically, you know, pretty heartless and pretty much like, you know, don't be a wuss. And you gotta, you know, I mean, well, you gotta not be a wuss. But it's like, don't be a wuss. And that's it. It's like, toughen up. The world's hard and that's all you got. And I don't think that's the right way either. I don't think that's the right way to treat yourself, your partner, your family. I think you need both of these muscles.

I'm so glad you said that. And that's at the heart of my book. Radical Responsibility is blending radical responsibility with radical compassion, self compassion, compassion for others. And yeah, there is a lot of kind of out in the mental toughness literature out there. There's some people that have some good messages, but it lacks a little bit of the self. Compassion and awareness. Compassion for other benefit. And so many people tend to think it's an either or. It's not an either or, It's a both. Right, Both, Exactly.

Practice both.

Yeah, Very important. So, again, we can speak about all this in kind of psychological terms, different terms, but we're talking about here rewiring our beliefs. So we're implying that there's a neurobiology to all this. And from the perspective of the reality of neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, that we literally can change the brain, we can reshape our neural architecture to support our success. I wonder if you could talk about it a little bit about this stepping into greater possibilities of abundance and wealth and creativity, generativity. What does that mean in terms of the. Of changing our brain? Literally changing our brain?

Well, when you say, you know, a term like rewiring.

Right.

What we're. This is a metaphor, right? And what we mean here is that it's possible basically to go in and work, take tools out and work on your own brain. Like, work on your own mind. And. Right. This notion of neuroplasticity that we can learn, we, you know, neurons that fire together, wire together. We can create new pathways, we can make neurotic neurogenesis, we can make new neurons. This is extraordinary stuff because what it actually is showing is that, like, it's the science, right? It's the research, it's the validation that we can, in fact, use our mind to change our mind. We can use our brain to change our brain. And that's a key belief to have. It's just a very important thing to walk around realizing, I can go to work on my own brain. It's like a belief, it's like a meta belief that you have. And then in order to do it, we want to use the most leverage we possibly can. You know, we want to get the most leverage we possibly can. Tony Robbins talks about, you know, something he learned from Jim Rohn, which is get leverage on yourself. Right. Archimedes said, give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the world. And so what you want is a lever long enough and a place to stand, to move your own mind, to move your own brain. And there are many ways to do this. One of them is to create rituals of the Behaviors that you want to imprint and then do the ritual every day for 30 days. This is, you know, the work of Jim Lehrer and Tony Schwartz. Very powerful to do this right. But you have to use your willpower every day to do that ritual every day for 30 days to imprint it. Another, you know, super power move that we can make. Probably the most, probably the longest lever that has the, you know, the biggest impact is just choosing our social influences, you know, in our community. If you just want to make progress rapidly in any new area, go and add multiple social influences and ideally a social group or a mastermind or a community that you go and belong yourself to. And then, you know, go and be there while they're practicing. Whatever it is, whether it's martial arts or psychology or business or whatever it is, just go be there with them and watch them do it and hang out with them so that you pick up the lingo, the beliefs, the value sets and it just, it goes to work rewiring yourself. And so the power to select your social influences, select your community, select your mastermind, select whatever, you know, industry group that you're trying to learn about. That's the big one.

What about, you know, these social influences are very important. And you talked before about the journey for some people is moving from employee to business owner, you know, entrepreneur, multiple business owner to investor, and that the mindset changes, the skill set changes, the game changes at every level. And so along the way that could impact who we also hang out with socially. I mean, some of us, there's probably some billionaires around us still have high school friends they see from back in the day, but we are strongly influenced by people we spend time with. Now. We're not going to give up on our families of origin or. But it does influence us. If we stay wedded to hanging out with folks who are not interested in optimizing their lives, it's going to be pretty tough to be focused on optimizing our own.

Yeah, I mean, as you know, this is a kind of long standing conversation and it's just the reality of things is whatever level you're at, whatever station you're at, whatever community you're a part of, whatever family you're in, whatever your kind of social fabric is around you, if you evolve, if you transform, if you go to the next level. Right. I've got my little spiral staircase here. Right. It's not about just taking one step up the spiral staircase. If you transform, you go all the way to the top and you are now at the next level. If you do that, that's going to be upsetting, intimidating, discouraging. It's going to create fear, jealousy, envy in at least some of the people that are in your milieu right now. And that's just the way that it is. Some people like where they're at. They feel safe, stable, whatever. They don't want anything to change. And if anyone starts messing with the system, they, you know, get destabilized. And that's, you know, that's just reality. That's the, that's just fine. And so I think it's wise to look at life as a kind of evolving social like journey, basically, and that what you're doing is you're moving through and learning. See, to me, life is about learning and growth and evolution. You know, we're the species that has the kind of brain and mind that can learn abstract knowledge so we can go and learn about all these new fields. And we happen to be alive at a time when there are, I don't know, thousands of different disciplines that have each spent decades to, you know, millennia studying and teasing apart all of these incredible different ways of doing things, from science to philosophy to music to art to politics. And so there's just this palette, this incredible opportunity to go and learn all these different things and then use them to create the artistic masterpiece of your own life and to create your art and your contribution. And so I think it's important to get out there, just like it's important to travel and go see how people live in different parts of the world. Because when you see it, it just changes everything. You know, we went to Africa last year. We actually went twice and I had not been before. It's really, really a game changer when you go out and, you know, you hang out with. And we camped one night with the oldest tribe on the planet. You know, that's got maybe that's like 30 miles from Olduvai Gorge where they found Lucy. And it's like you realize, oh my gosh, these people and their culture maybe descended all the way back from, you know, millions of years. And then you see how they live and it just changed. You know, you change, you go, oh, it's wow, it's okay to live in a different way. And I look at how they're doing this, and so I'm saying this because there's this great opportunity to go and learn, to incorporate things you learn from all around, like Steve Jobs talks about. You know, you pick them all up and you put them together in your own unique way. And it's okay that some people don't like to live that way. It's okay that some people will be upset by that or intimidated by that, but just keep going, you know, don't be an idiot social climber that is just using people. And then when you do find your next opportunity, you just abandon everyone and you're gone. I mean, you know, don't do that thing that's not that cool. You know, some people understand and some people don't. And that's also part of the game, you know, as you become successful, you know, you move into a smaller and smaller group, you know, and that's okay. That's okay.

I wonder if we could talk a little bit about mental frames we have beliefs, mental frames we have around just the notion of wealth altogether. And of course that could mean lots of different things to different people. And we can have a wealth of relationships, a wealth of spiritual life. We can have monetary wealth. But even in terms of monetary wealth, you know, how can we can shift from an idea of financial survival? And if, you know, if you watch the news and you listen to what's currently going on with political campaigns, how they talk about the economy, it seems like most people feel like they're in the financial survival game and they feel not kind of on the edge with that a lot of time. And financial thriving is maybe have more to do with mindset than it has to do with the actual money. I mean, we can get into financial freedom either by, you know, lowering our needs or upping our income or find that sweet spot in between, right, where for us this is sufficiency. And I don't. I have enough money to not even work. I'd live. Now if I want to live at a higher lifestyle, I'm going to have to have more investments to perpetuate that lifestyle. But we could all find this idea of financial freedom, financial thriving. But I wonder if you could talk about the mindset part of it, because if we don't have the, well, the optimal mindset for that, we're probably going to stay in a living in a sense of survival. Our whole lives around money. It's just going to feel like something there's not enough of, or maybe we got kind of enough, but it could disappear. And where there's all this uncertainty and insecurity and our whole relationship with the energy of monetary resources is pervaded by fear.

Well, I mean, back to traveling again. Fleet. My wife, whose family descends from India, like, you know, India Indians, and she took me 10 years ago and we went with her parents and you know, you go somewhere like the Darvi slum in Mumbai, you know, in Bombay where they have, I think it's a million people living in a square kilometer. I think that's what's happening there. And you expect when you go in there that, that, you know, it's going to be a bunch of people laying around dying and you know, whatever. But it's not. They are all hustling, it's all organized, everyone's working. It's just that they all make very little, you know. And again, traveling around the world, you kind of start to realize, wait a minute, you know, especially if you're living in a first world country like America, you go somewhere like that and you see what's happening and you, oh. Because it really depends on what you're trying to do with the money. You know, I have friends that are worth, I don't know, a lot, okay, like hundreds of millions to billions. And I watch them worrying about money and getting all stressed out and still trying to get more. And Biggie Smalls, right, he said, mo money, mo problems. And I can tell you that is the case for a lot of people because they're trying to get the money, you know, to fix some thing that was happening when they were a kid. They're trying to solve some wound of not enough or impress some person or, you know, I remember hearing a story, I don't remember where I picked this one up, but somebody that became a billionaire and I think his company went public or something, you know, he went out into the backyard and looked up into the sky and he said, are you happy now, dad? You know, are you finally happy with me? You know, and it's like, like, oh my God, you know, and so wealth, man, wealth is relative, man. Because I've been up and I have been down in my life a couple of times and yeah, you know, I got a good business and I got a nice life and you know, I've made some money and I, it's cool and I prefer it, you know, definitely. But that's not it, you know, that's not it. It's really, I think in terms of like satisfaction with life and happiness and so forth, it's really about learning how to enjoy this moment and enjoy the gift of life and enjoy the gift of relationship and other things. And then the money making thing, you go to work on that and you just, you do it. You know, the people that I know that are really successful, most of them, I mean, some people get Lucky. And that happens. But the ones I know are really successful, man. They work hard. They work hard, they stay focused for 10, 20 years, they go learn their craft, they become really good at what they do, they learn different skills, they challenge themselves. And so, yeah, I don't know. That's my answer.

Yeah. I wonder if you could say something about the relationship between wealth, however we define it, and generosity. I don't know who's probably many people have said this, but if you think money won't make you happy, you haven't given away enough yet, right? But a lot of the teachers of abundance and wealth building and salesmanship, a lot of the classic teachers talk about getting in this flow of energy and that it's about being generative and being generous and tapping into that flow. It's not about hoarding and miserliness and getting mine.

Okay, so in the, you know, the modern kind of self help world, right, we talk a lot about energy and we talk a lot about this, whatever that is kind of thing. And it's, I think it's important to get that as you evolve in life, you need to create value in different ways and then you need to receive, like produce value for others and then receive value back from them. And so there are these common denominators to do that, like money, you know, and sometimes people will say, well, money is just energy. Or they'll say, well, money is just a database, you know, or money is just a way of counting things or measuring and. But I think for me it all comes down to value. How much value am I producing and then how much value am I receiving? Now some people have a challenge when they produce a lot of value, giving it away. Like I've taught people for many years how to create online courses, how to teach, how to do group coaching programs, this kind of stuff, and one on one coaching. And I've noticed that a lot of people, they have a, you know, a great idea, but they don't want to tell anyone or like they don't, like they want to hold. They keep all their value for them. You know, I remember my grandmother who, you know, grew up very poor and had a very poor family. You know, she would be like, always hold a little bit back. Never give people everything you got, like never give all your cards away kind of thing, you know, And I think that we have to get into relationship with how value works and value exchange in different ways and in different places. And then we have to realize, oh no, actually this is about produce as much value as you possibly can and then figure out how to get it out in the world. But then you have to solve the other problem of receiving value because a lot of people have a quote unquote poverty mentality and they don't know how to ask to be paid. So they're just going around giving everything away and then never asking to get anything back and wondering why people are taking advantage of them. So you also have to ask to be paid. You have to make offers, you have to learn about sales and marketing. You have to set up transactions that really work for you and the other person and you have to enforce them. You know, when you become self employed, when you have a job, you get your paycheck every two weeks or whatever and it just kind of goes like clockwork. And if you ever don't get paid, something is wrong, man, and you better worry. And you're like, is everything okay with the company? Is my job okay? When you become self employed, you learn this very valuable lesson, which is you don't get paid just because you got the contract and you did the work. Now you gotta follow up with people because like 20% of them don't pay you when, you know you thought they would. And some of them, you know, we were just on today with my wife, we're like talking about people that haven't paid her that have owed her money for like three months, six months. And you know, they're good people and they're going to pay her at some point because just something happened. And then you got to follow up on this. And so you have to receive the value back too. And you got to get good at collecting the value. You know, you got to be a little collection specialist too. And what we could do is we could take it even beyond value and we could just say, well, let's call the common denominator energy. Let's just call it that. Because we need something that's the common denominator for this exchange of value. Exchange of something. You know, we could call it an exchange of energy, but we have to learn how it works on the physical level, on the emotional and social level, on the mental level, on the spiritual level. And then we have to get into relationship and we have to become part of the economy and we have to learn how to create a lot of value, and we have to learn how to receive a lot of value. And then we have to learn how to manage all that value. Because another thing that happens, Fleet, that's totally interesting is I had a friend who was a little bit of a mentor Many years ago, like 15 plus years ago, when my business took off and started doing well. And he was, you know, rumored to be worth like a hundred million dollars. And he had been in dozens of different industries. Very smart, savvy guy. He came to America when afik was like 20 with 50 bucks in his pocket and just built it from, you know, from scratch. And he said something that I'll never forget. He says, it's harder to keep money than it is to make it. And when I heard that, I was like, huh, Harder to keep money? And I was like, that does sound right to me. And then I've built on that right over the years. And it's harder to grow money than it is to keep it. So these are skills, they're new sets of skills that we have to learn. I just heard a story the other day about a woman whose husband died and, and she was living on some kind of a pension or, I don't know, some kind of annuity or there was something. And she went in and talked to, you know, whoever was running the trust or somebody at the bank. And she'd been doing this for years and you know, they, she was like, oh, what's going on? And they finally, they said to her, like, how much money was left and like how valuable whatever the trust was. And she was like, oh my God, I had no idea. And within months, it was all gone, you know, because we just don't know how to deal with this, you know, we don't know how to manage it. So there's skills that we have to learn at each level and that's what helps us to succeed.

You know, here again, I think whatever level of whatever economic station anyone wants to be at and is happy at is obviously perfectly good for wherever one is in this western culture, in a first world country like the US and other countries in Europe and so forth. Well, maybe a little different year. There's a little bigger social net in Europe. But, you know, I think it can be helpful to at least sort of play the game, to use that analogy. Play the game well enough that we can basically take care of ourselves and take care of our families. And if something untoward happened, we'd be more or less okay. We wouldn't just be out on the streets, it seems to me good to work hard enough and figure out how to play the game well enough to at least develop some level of financial security. In my own case, you know, I had that background of growing up with parents that had the kind of fear and survival mentality from the Depression and World War II, and then, you know, the small business thing. And then I revolted and became a hippie and anti capitalist, anti materialist. Then I became a Buddhist, and I misinterpreted Buddhism to think it was completely anti material and all that. And it took me a while to work my way through all that, although I always had entrepreneurial instincts. But, you know, these things, it's not like I know I'm perfectly good the way I am. Even if I ended up back in prison, which I have no desire to do, I'd be okay. Three hots and a cot. You know, I'd read a lot of books, I'd be okay. I go, I take people out on the streets and do these things called street retreats with the Zen peacemakers, where people experience what it's like to be on the streets with no money. I know I'm okay there, but at this point in my life, I kind of think, why not play the game as well as I can? And then whatever resources that develops for myself and my family, that's good, gives us some financial freedom, some financial security, and whatever else I can have, I can give away. But why not take whatever talents I have within the context of the milieu I am, I'm in here, like in the US and just use my talents to play the game as well as I can and trust that the rest of it's gonna, you know, gonna flow however it flows. I'm curious about, you know, maybe developing a little bit of that kind of philosophy, if that makes sense to you.

Yeah, exactly. I'm a, you know, a big fan of Vilfredo Pareto.

Right.

He looked around and he saw that in his garden, 80% of the peas were in 20% of the pods. And he looked around and he saw that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the people. And he generalized us and created that thing you said, the Pareto principle. And he basically noticed that in productive systems, 80% of the results were created by 20% of the work, but also 20% of the results were created by 80% of the work. So most of the work that people are doing is pretty much being wasted. And it turns out that it's fractal. So it's like 1% is creating 50%. You know, if you go into a big corporation that's got a hundred salespeople, for example, you're going to find that 20 of those people are making 80% of the sales. And in fact, there's probably a few of Them that are making like 30 or 40 or 50% of the sales, like the major producers. And what you want to do is go, what are you guys doing? You know? And so I really feel, and I mean, I feel this fleet, like I have won the game of life or I am winning the game of life. I've got lots of friends that are in better physical shape than me, like, big, muscular, buffer, have better stamina, whatever. I've got friends that are way richer than me. I mean, I'm just, you know, whatever. I'm okay. And success. I have friends that are so many times richer than me. I have all these people in my life that do better than me in pretty much every area. I've got friends that I think are better parents than me. I've got friends that I think are better husbands than me and so forth. But what makes me unique is, I think is I've gone and tried to find that Pareto 20% in all of the key areas. Health and fitness, relationships, parenting, business, money, wealth, inner game, spirituality. And I run around like a plate spinner in my different areas of my life, trying to keep each of them working. Just that top 20%. To me, that's the game is making a life that really works. And you know what? You go through challenges sometimes. You know, I have health challenges or I have money challenges or business, or my wife and I get in fights for a while or whatever. You know, I've got the same kind of stuff, but I just, I feel like I've got so many more tools than most people because I'm collecting them from more diverse places. I'm collecting more mental models. And I'm not trying. I'm not getting too focused on one area and getting lost in there and trying to impress anyone or whatever. I don't, you know. Yeah, I mean, sure, I like it if people think I have nice clothes or a nice car or whatever, but I learned a long time ago nobody cares. Nobody gives an F about whatever you're doing or your success and the kind of people who are impressed by it, but they're not the ones that you would want to have impressed by it anyway. Nobody really cares. Who was it that said, you know, if you realize how quickly you're forgotten after you die, you'll stop trying to impress people because it's just a losing game. It just doesn't freaking matter, you know? So figure out a different way to measure. You know, figure out how to measure your success yourself and then learn how to enjoy it and have a good time. When you have a little bit of success, give yourself a break. But work hard, you know, Work hard, right? It's like it's that old. I think it was Dave Kekich that said, life is hard if you live it the easy way and easy if you live it the hard way. So get up and live 80%. Challenge yourself. Go and do hard things in all different kinds of areas. Take on big responsibilities so that when you get the leisure time, you can. And then relax, you know, go to the Chinese place and get the strong massage kind of thing and go on a road trip somewhere, take yourself to the beach, meditate, treat yourself to some good food once in a while, but don't get caught up in anything, you know, just enjoy your fricking life.

I love that. I love that. And there's a book about. What is that? It's a well known book about doing the hard things. But there is something, and you talked about challenging ourselves, and I think we do need to challenge ourselves with doing the hard things. But I love your application of the Pareto principle, the 8020 rule, throughout your life. And to me, that's not only working hard, it's working smart. Right? Because you're putting your effort where it's going to get the biggest, most leverage payoff. And on top of that, and this is something I just want to call out is your success has really become, for me, I think has arisen from you not only figuring that out about all these different aspects of your life, but then you go out and teach it. Everything you learn about how to apply the 8020 principle to your life, you go out and teach it and share it with others. And that seems like where your real success is coming from.

Okay, well, if there, if I have a success strategy fleet, that's it.

Okay.

That is my success strategy, which is I've gone through my life, I've created, I mean, I've probably created close to a hundred courses now in 25 years. And I go and learn something, and I learn it knowing that I'm probably going to be teaching it someday. So I take notes. I learn intentionally. I go looking for the Pareto 20% or 1%. I ask questions, you know, I go find people who are having success and instead of just reading the superficial book with the, you know, the dummies guide or the whatever, I ask them, how do you see reality? Like, what do you believe about how the world works? What are your values? How do you have relationships? And I try to model the person as well, or the group of people and then I try to learn what the key success steps are. And go figure it out for yourself.

Right.

Don't take whatever the received wisdom. I mean, obviously study whatever the received wisdom is, but don't just get too caught up in the way things used to be. Just go and learn and then teach, learn and then teach and learn in order to teach and teach in order to learn. That's the trick. As soon as you learn something, get out there and teach people immediately. If there was one, like, success strategy that I have, that is it.

Well, you have so many fabulous courses, so many fabulous courses on every aspect of marketing, especially digital marketing. But I want to call out one course that made a big difference to me called Waking Up Productive. And I think it's one of your great courses. And I know it's probably helped countless people on their journey.

Yeah. Yeah. A lot of folks have been through that course.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah. Well, this has been illuminating. And, you know, I also wanted to name one thing that's so obvious from everything you've shared, that you are such an exemplar of what Carol Dweck called the growth mindset. And I think so many of us limit ourselves by just thinking, you know, that's the way I am. That's the way life is, the way it's always been. It's not going to change. Right. We think we are this fixed entity, and it's just not true at all. We know even scientifically now with neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, it's all changeable. And you've lived in that spirit of the growth mindset continually, and you're still living there and such an exemplar of it. So thank you so much for very generously sharing your wisdom and experience with us.

Yeah, thanks, Lee. Great being here.

Yeah. Thank you, Evan. Be well. Thank you for joining me on the radical responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present, and stay true to you. Take care.

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