Homeless to Billionaire | Jack Canfield

Hi. In a previous video, I talked about a man named Andres Pira who wrote a book called Homeless to Billionaire to give you a little backstory in case you weren't there. Andres, at the age of 19, moved from Sweden down to Thailand and went to the island of Phuket. And after a couple months, he ended up homeless on the beach. And he sent to a friend, he said, I want you to send me a hundred dollars. Send him a text that would send me $100. Friend said, no, you weren't that good a friend. I'm not going to send you $100. However, I'm going to send you a book that I think can change your life. And he sent him a text attachment of the book the Secret. And he read that and he learned about the law of attraction. He started applying the law of attraction to his life. And after a few years, he started to have his own construction company. He was building apartment buildings and condo complexes and hotels and resorts. And by the age of 35, only 15 years later, he was worth $3 billion. So almost a billionaire in 15 years. And in this book, Almost a Billionaire, he Talks about the 17 principles of success that allowed him to come to that place where he was a billionaire. And he studied my work. He studied the work of Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy and Bob Proctor and many of those people that you know about. And in the earlier video, I talked about the first 10 principles that he used that led him to a success. You can find that video on YouTube and other places and just look for homeless to billionaire. But I want to share with you today some of the other principles that I didn't get time to share with you last time that he claims and uses to create the billionaire lifestyle that he has. And one of them is called welcome problems. In other words, he wakes up every day expecting problems, not like he wants to have them. But he knows that life is full of problems. And if you expect that they're coming, you know how to deal with them not as problems, but as opportunities. And the phrase you always want to use is, what's the opportunity that this is? So a problem is an opportunity to come up with new solutions, develop new qualities, develop new teams, and actually become more competent in the process of doing that. Billionaires know there's always a solution to every problem. They don't think as problems, as obstacles. They think of them as challenges that they just need to overcome. And there's always a solution. So they think solution oriented so they don't get so sidetracked when a problem shows up or an obstacle shows up, they just know it's part of the process and they keep going. So that's the first principle. The next principle is embrace apology. Now, what does he mean by that? He means that if you're going to be a good leader, and he has 19 companies, over 250 employees, is that you have to be willing to apologize when you make a mistake. Sometimes you have to apologize to your employees, sometimes you have to apologize to your vendors, sometimes you have to apologize to your clients. And maybe you have to apologize to family members. I know it's very difficult for me when I was realized I'd made a mistake with my children and I needed to apologize. I'm sorry, I was wrong. But when you do that, you engender trust. People trust you more. They realize you're human. They give you the space to make mistakes. And also you know that you're creating an environment where they're going to make mistakes as well. But when you're in the unknown, forging ahead into areas where no one's been successful before, like he was the first time he built a resort or build a condo complex, he knew that he was going to make some mistakes and he knew he'd have to apologize. And that apology allows energy to move better than be stuck rather than for people to be afraid of you. It's not okay to make a mistake or for you to be defensive and not admit the mistakes that you've made. A lot of people don't admit their mistakes because they feel like it's somehow a blemish on their character. It means they're inadequate, they're incompetent, and, you know, we're all just learning in the process. And so give yourself permission to make mistakes and be willing to issue apologies when they're necessary. Takes courage to do that, but it builds people's respect for you, and ultimately it builds your own self respect as well. His next principle was fit body, strong mind. And what he realized is all the research shows that the best way to have your mind in shape is to have your body in shape. You know, the Greeks and the Latins are based in mens corpora and corpora sano. And it was have a good mind in a sane mind, in a sane, in a healthy body. And that's why the Olympics were created back in the great days, because people knew they had to be healthy and fit. And when you're healthy and fit, your brain works better, you get better ideas, and successful people always exercise. Another book that I wrote A forward to was the billionaire secret. And we found this friend of mine, Rafael Bazieg, who interviewed 21 billionaires. Every one of them got up early and every one of them exercised every day, including people that were 80 years old. And so exercise is part of every billionaire's toolkit, if you will, part of their daily disciplines. And he went ahead and he researched the exercise habits of ultra successful people. And here's what he found. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, works out three times a week running with his dog in the morning. Richard Branson, who started the Virgin Group, Virgin airlines, has over 300 companies, gets up every morning at 5am kites, surfs, swims, plays tennis and claims he gets four hours of additional productivity every day simply because of his exercise. Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State, got up every morning at 4:30 and exercised cardio or treadmill or elliptical for 45 minutes every single day. Former President Barack Obama, 45 minutes a day, day, six days a week, he was alternating between cardio and weights. How about Mark Cuban, billionaire, owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, member of the Shark Tank crew, all kinds of companies that he's invested again, an hour of cardio six days a week. These are elliptical, StairMaster, playing basketball, kickboxing and aerobics. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, gets up at 4:30 every morning, goes to the gym several times a week, also cycles and rock climbs. So the idea here is you need to get the exercise because it's actually activating your brain. And they say it's the most powerful way to avoid dementia, Alzheimer's or any of those kind of debilitating brain diseases. A lot of the experts say exercise is the single most powerful tool you have to optimize brain function and to reduce Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, dementia. So most people say aerobics for 45 minutes six times a week is the best thing. They say the minimum will be three times a week, 30 minutes. You know, if you exercise for 30 minutes three times a week, it puts you in a top 1/10 of 1% of fitness in America. Think about that. That's how unfit most of our country is. And look at the people that are super successful on all these billionaires and millionaires are exercising. Now, the last principle I want to share with you today, and there's a few more I'll do in the future, is pay more, give more, keep more. And what he meant by that is you want to pay more to the people that are your employees and your vendors. In other words, don't Skimp. When you pay people little, then they don't have as much money to do the detailed work that they need to do. And he talked about a company where he hired them to do some design work for him. They. But he tried to, like, you know, get the best deal he could. And in the process, they didn't really have enough money and they were outsourcing stuff to cheaper vendors. And the whole thing kind of went to hell because it didn't work real well because they weren't getting the best resources that they could on the project. So he offers to pay more. I remember a man telling me once that when he had someone build a house for him, he says, what's your bid? And then after they give him the bid, he says, I'm going to give you 20% more than your bid, but I want you to build this like you were building it for yourself. And he said, I get the best service, I get the best construction, I get the best everything when I do that. And he also talked about giving more, giving more personally, in other words, spending time with people, appreciating them. You know, he talks about his staff, and he's got 250 employees. And what he does with those people is he sends them the trainings, he motivates them, he appreciates them, he takes them on outings like they'll climb a mountain together, they'll go to some adventure thing together. They have lots of staff gatherings together, as we do in our company. We sometimes gather the whole staff, run a fire pit. We'll sit and talk from 4 in the afternoon till it's late at night and 9 o' clock and you can hardly see, but the fire is going. And you have that kind of primal thing that people do when they sit around fires that bonds the group in a great way. We spend a lot of money on staff training, on learning more about marketing and sales and enrollment and all those kind of things. So people in my company have very, very, very, very little turnover. People stay for a long, long time because they feel valued. And so you want to give more time to people, more appreciation, more acknowledgement with them, and then the last thing is to keep more for yourself. He talks about how in his company, he mostly manages by cell phone and by text. And basically he doesn't have to be there micromanaging everything. When you micromanage people, they feel like you don't trust them, and then they don't. They're not willing to take as many risks. And the great breakthroughs occur with risks. And so make sure that you're keeping time for yourself to do the things that you want to do. One of my friends is a lawyer and he went back and I said, I want you to take a free day every day where you don't go to work. And so he had started working from home for one thing, and he started taking free days which are midnight to midnight with no work related activity. He found he had much more time when he wasn't responding to all the little fires in the office to think bigger picture. And that led to an acquisition and a merger with another law firm which allowed him to practice many more forms of law than he was. And he's doubled his income as a result of that. So you want time for family, for your health, for vacations, for exercise and things like that. And if you do that, then you're going to have more joy and actually more productivity. Research shows that entrepreneurs that take more time for themselves are actually more productive than people that are workaholics. So these are some more principles for success. I hope you find these useful and in the future one of these videos, I'll tell you the rest of the ones that we didn't get to today and so apply these and we'll see you next time. Well, thanks for watching today. I hope you got value and if you did, please take a moment to like it, share it with someone you care about who could get benefit from also watching this. And make sure to subscribe to our channel here at YouTube so that we can you can get more information. There's going to be a lot of these coming out over the course of the year. We'd love to have you get take advantage of that. And if you'd like more information on what we talked about, make sure to go to my website@jackcampfield.com where there's a lot of free resources that will help you take what you learned today even further. So thanks for watching.