Ep. 132- From Department of Defense to Home Hacking with GoBundance Member Rylee Knox

This is the You Winning Life Podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence. Each episode we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights, and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes. Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed LMFT 🎗️, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, and certified entrepreneur coach Jason Wasser.

Ah, so already second interview of the day and may have made a new best friend, guys. Like, this is, uh, this is the magic of podcasting. This is the magic of being in these type of communities. And, um, oh gosh, Riley Knox. Right, I'm not even gonna do your intro, your interview, I mean your interview, your intro, because your story's gonna give your intro. But let's just talk, right? Family man, real estate, started off in engineering. We're gonna get into all of that, but you have some really interesting passions that we were talking about before we started. I don't even know where to start because I usually have this nice flow, but we already started this amazing conversation a few minutes ago. Give us a 30-second, 45-second, who the heck are you?

Man, I am a father, a husband, an adventurer. It's probably pretty core to my identity. I'm an explorer, an adventurer. Um, yeah. I'm a guy loving life. That's who I am, what I do. I went to high school and college and studied engineering, worked for the Department of Defense as a nuclear test engineer for a very, very small career. Um, and then, uh, yeah, I'm in multifamily real estate, which is just, it's how I make money. It's not who I am. Um, I'm a real estate agent and, uh, that's who I am. That's what I'm doing.

Yeah.

So, so I love this. I live in South Florida and my longstanding running joke has been, so I know what someone does and they're also a realtor, right? So if all these people like, oh, what do you do? I'm a therapist. Oh, but, but I'm also selling real estate. I'm like, so I don't get this, right? So obviously I'm now in this entrepreneurial space and I'm learning and growing into the beautiful thing of, of real estate and being in that world. Um, and I know that like 98% of the people in this community of this conference— so again, we're sitting here, we're at the GoBundance Miami conference, and these episodes are in partnership with, uh, On Air Brands and my good buddy Eric Cabral. So shout out to, to y'all. And, um, why, why is 98% of this community in real estate? Let's just start there.

So glad you asked that question. 'Cause I'm like thinking about it as you're talking about it. 'Cause we're here and this is a mastermind and I'm having conversations with all these guys and most of these guys, we're all high-profile individuals, if you will. And we're not talking about real estate. You know, when I'm talking to these guys, we're talking about marriages and businesses and kids and adventure and health and wellness. So why real estate, right? Well, um, I think it's because we're, we're all passionate people trying to live life fully. One thing that helps us to live life fully is having our income not be attached to our time. Um, so real estate is an asset class that provides cash flow that's not associated with your time. So 70% of my income comes from a rental property portfolio, um, that I spend 10 hours a year managing, right? The rest of my—

wait, can you say that again? How many hours a year?

10. Yeah, yeah. The rest of my income comes from real estate agency, which I spend 70 hours a week practicing and working in. But so I think that's the thing, right? If like most of us, the things that we value aren't always necessarily work. Some of us really value exercise or adventure or our marriage or our children or schooling or, um, branding or sharing a message or having a platform or starting a business or a nonprofit that the profit's not so certain. So we need a way to pay bills and grow our wealth and net worth that's not associated with our time so that we can do the things with our time that we're passionate about. So I think that's why. And then I, yeah. And then real estate, it touches everyone's life, right? I mean, everyone in America, like not everyone in America can tell you what Luna is. It's a cryptocurrency, right? Not everyone in America can tell you what Luna is, but everyone in America can tell you what a house is. It touches everybody. There's all kinds of it. We all experience it every day. We walk in and out of stores. We store our belongings in a storage facility. We live in an apartment. We live in a house. So it's an asset class that's super intuitive and familiar. It's not rocket science. That's why people are in real estate. It's not complicated. It's not rocket science.

Well, last night we heard Ryan Serhant. It's so funny. I was watching one of his clips and he's running through the streets with his team and someone's like, "Ryan Seacrest!" And he's like, "Serhant!" So it's like, Which of the Ryans do we get to hang out with? But like, he was talking about like, it's back in the day, like in the '80s, right? I grew up in the— I was a child of the '80s. And like, you know, it was like he was saying it like, it was kind of like, well, if you didn't— like it was the housewife's thing. And it was like, well, if you didn't make it, right? It was like relegated to like a lower, you know, thing of a job in a field in an industry. And it's just, it's transformed magically.

Yeah.

Why do you think that is? Like, just from like that, from a real estate agency perspective, like, yeah, or even as like that whole idea of like getting in on this, right? It's, it's, I mean, you say like everybody missed the crypto bubble and like, uh, like whatever, but there's a, there's a psychology behind this industry now that wasn't there maybe 15 years ago.

Yeah. So I think there's two separate worlds, right? You have like the world of owning real estate and then the world of real estate agency or, or operating businesses associated in parallel to the real estate industry. And obviously I'm in both, both of those spheres. Here's, I think, the big difference. It goes beyond real estate, I think. All right, we're going deep, we're going deep. Um, are you familiar at all with Acton Academy? No. Okay, uh, so I listened to the founder of Acton Academy talking on a podcast, and I don't know him personally, but I listen to him talk and he talks about alternative education, right? And that the prevailing education model in the United States is actually alternative education, right? And what he's advocating for is a return to traditional education. And what he means by that is from time zero to the late 1800s, all education, all education was through apprenticeship, relationship, on-the-job training, and experiential. And what happened in the late 1800s is a bunch of factory owners got together and said, hey, we need a system that will like produce employees that are more obedient and compliant. So here's what we'll do: K through 12, we'll stick them in a classroom, we'll give them assignments, Um, and that, and we'll teach them all the things they need to know to be a really great employee.

A funnel.

A funnel.

Yeah.

And that's what we did as a country. It served a very specific purpose. It's been 150 years since then and we're still doing it. So people are starting to wake up and realize that there is a prevailing system that was grooming them to be an employee, to generate wealth and abundance for someone else, and they are realizing that they can make money in other ways than being an employee, and they're realizing that they can work other time periods than a 40-hour 9 to 5. And they're realizing that they have choices with their life on how they want to live it. So I think real estate is just one career field, one asset class that is providing people with a really good vehicle to design their lives. But I think like as a, as a nation over the last decade, we are shifting our thought process around making money. I mean, when I was in high school, it was like, you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, an attorney, you know, no one talked about being an insurance sales agent. No one talked about being a podcaster or an influencer. No one talked about being a coach. There, there's just so— or selling a product, right? Nobody, nobody learns in middle school that you can sell products.

Well, that's all this, the old, right, Zig Ziglar and the door-to-door salesman, or right, with Ray Kroc from McDonald's. But when he was just right, it was how many things did he go into and try to sell before he really harnessed what McDonald's was, the McDonald's brothers were doing.

Yeah. So just giving yourself permission to like realize that you have value to add to the world and that like you can probably get paid for that value.

Sure.

Now, obviously there's a lot more risk. Like the reason people have jobs is because it's a lot easier generally, you know, at first, you know, you get a paycheck every 2 weeks. It's easy. It's easy to have a budget if you have a job. You get the same paycheck every 2 weeks. Now, going out on your own and kind of doing something a little bit more entrepreneurial takes that away. So now, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, presumably you have to live below your means because you're not going to get the same paycheck every 2 weeks. So you're going to have really good weeks and really bad weeks and really good months and zero months. So I think that that's— people are— so like the first— awakening, if you will, is realizing that you don't have to be an employee for an employer if you don't want to, and that that's not the only option for you. The second awakening is realizing that, okay, if I'm not going to have a safe, stable income, I'm gonna have to design my life and my finances a little bit differently to accommodate that. Yeah, um, so maybe I'm not going to take out a lot of, uh, car payments, um, things that are going to require me to make X amount of dollars every month. Um, so that's—

yeah, that's—

I just— I think that's where we're headed as a— oh, as a— as a people.

I agree. And I was one of those people who had that awakening. We were talking before, we were talking about like, how did it— you know, why did I do this? As far as like, the podcast came out of being a therapist, but I didn't do it as a therapist to start this podcast. I did it as once I got my foot into the world of entrepreneurship and being around people like yourself, and then finally realizing like, oh, everything I thought about this entrepreneurial mind, right? There's two things that I see it as. One is being an entrepreneur, which is what, right, you and many other people and pretty much everybody else in this community here that's doing. And then there's being entrepreneurial, which is when you're talking about like, right, there's a different way to do this. There's deciding your core values, deciding where you want to put your time, effort, energy, and money, deciding that you're going to have alignment in different parts. And you don't have to own a company to be entrepreneurial, but I do think it goes back to what's the bigger thing? What's my mission? What's my purpose? And as you were talking, it's reminding me of something I've been dancing through over the last many years, but really solidified with one of my, my, uh, one of my coaching clients this last week where I realized when I was starting off my first job as a therapist and you had to go around, you had to apply to all the different agencies because you didn't go into private practice then. It's like you got to be someone's whatever, for 2, 3 years you're making $33,000, $34,000, $35,000, and you hope someone takes you, even if it's not a population you want to work with. You need the job, you need the hours so you can get licensed fully. It's like $35,000, and it wasn't even like— it was a cool environment, and I was— I believed in the environment, but I was like, well, no, you're going to come from 4 PM until midnight. I'm like, what therapy is that? Oh no, well, you might do therapy. It's like walk and talk, and you're going to be hanging out, and, and, you know, if they need you, they'll come get you. And I'm like Oh, well, I did that as a camp counselor when I was 18, but that's not where I'm at now. And I actually remember walking out and saying no to the job, which is the first time I've ever done that in my life. And people are freaking out. What do you mean? But they offer you a job and it's great and you'll have connections and maybe you can move up in administration. I'm like, for what, $40,000, $50,000 a year? Meanwhile, I was working at a synagogue being a youth director and doing stuff on the side, right, that was making more there. Than I would be doing in a job that I got my master's degree for.

Right, right. Yeah.

So this has been simmering in me, and it's simmering in my clients, it's simmering in people in this community, where a lot of times people feel that when they apply for a job, they need that job more than the job needs them. And therefore they're creating that for themselves.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Being in a position— I'll just— I want to drill down on the word need.

Yeah.

The word need. What we need as human beings, we need our heart to beat and we need to convert oxygen to CO2. I think we really need relationships. Um, we need food and we need water. Shelter is arguable.

Sure.

Um, So we don't, we don't need much. We certainly don't need jobs. I mean, right, nobody, nobody had jobs prior to, uh, Christ. Nobody had jobs at 500, you know, like nobody had jobs. People didn't have jobs, they just had work, right? People have, people have work long before they had jobs. People had hunting and home building. And, um, so we don't need jobs, we need work. We need to add value to meaningful meaningful work. Um, so that's kind of like the way that my wife would talk about that a lot, like, what are our needs? Well, we don't, we don't need anything. Um, because the things we need, like, actually can't really be bought. We need relationships, oxygen, food, and our heart to beat.

And you can amplify those through our vocation to get there. And, you know, I know a big part of your most recent story was some of the stuff that's Yeah, with your wife and yeah, health stuff. And, um, can you walk through some of that for a little bit?

Because I know it's kind of—

sure, a little bit of it. I know it's a quick sharp pivot, but I think it's so relevant to what you're saying because, you know, I, I, I'm, you know, I only know a little bit about your story. And I know, and I hear this all the time where someone's like, well, my family member's sick, or my kid had to come home from school, and now I get like, I can't work, and I couldn't handle this project, and I had to cancel a business trip. And, you know, and what we're talking about is these two parallel worlds of when you're in one space, you're either sacrificing the money or you're sacrificing to be able to be present. When you're in this other vertical, yeah, all that might go away and you have the time and you have the presence and you might also have the ability to solve the problem in a much better way.

Yeah. So, okay, yeah, I'm happy to answer this question. So what I'm going to share, I guess, uh, is a question I answered yesterday in phrased differently, and yesterday it was phrased as like, what is the peak experience of your life, right? Um, and what did you learn from it? So the peak experience of my life, um, my wife— I'm gonna get there, I'm gonna come back to the peak experience. 10 years ago, my wife was diagnosed with brain cancer and, uh, had emergency brain surgery and a pretty significant portion of her left frontal lobe removed. Um, after the surgery, she couldn't walk, she couldn't talk, she had to relearn how to do all that. I was not married to her at the time, I did not know her at the time. Um, but incredible to overcome that, right? Um, fast forward 10 years, uh, my wife, um, has not had any recurrence of the brain cancer, but in 2020, my my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer at the same time period that we found out that we're pregnant with our daughter. Super, super mixed emotions, right? I mean, like the same week, same week we found out both. We're super, super excited that we're gonna have a baby. My wife's been trying for a child for many years and very excited. At the same time, she has cancer. Thrilled and excited, and I don't know how much you know about cancer, but— Scary as shit. It's really hard to treat when you have a baby inside of you because most chemotherapy treatments, they're sort of designed to target rapidly dividing cells. Right.

That's what's going on in an embryo.

So it's wicked complicated to treat. So, ah, my wife has like fear, joy, more fear when she realizes how complicated this is truly gonna be. So I'll spare you all the details. My wife is incredible and has fought very hard. We've had incredible doctors, incredible loved ones, people who have supported us. And all of this happens, my wife is going through the, pregnancy and fighting the breast cancer and on chemotherapy and pregnancy, breast cancer, chemotherapy. Uh, December 13th, 2020. Um, we go to the doctor for a, uh, we had a little bit of a complication, so we went in in a very relaxed manner, in a very relaxed, non-hurried state to see our OB-GYN. And we had a 30-minute chat about what was going on. And then she did an exam on my wife and said, "Oh my goodness, you're having a baby right now." Um, the hospital we had the baby at does not perform deliveries of babies under 36 weeks, but we did not have another option, so they did perform the delivery of our 28-week baby. She was 2 pounds. She was almost exactly the size of this water bottle when she was born. And we were rushed, uh, to Portland, Maine, uh, where we stayed in the neonatal ICU for 67 days with our daughter. When I say— and I truly mean this when I say— the peak experience of my life. Because my wife had had brain cancer 10 years ago when we got married, we started intentionally setting up our finances in such a way that I thought to myself, hey, the type of cancer she had, statistically pretty likely it was going to come back, I wanted to make sure we were in a situation where if my wife ended up in a hospital for 6 months, um, I was going to be able to be there to support her. So it was always important to us. So like, there's a lot of things we didn't do— cars we didn't buy, houses we didn't buy, vacations we didn't go on— because in my mind I was like, if my wife ends up in that situation, I do not want to have to go to work. That, that, that's not in alignment with my values. And that didn't happen to my wife. My wife has never spent an extended period of time in the hospital, but it happened to my daughter. So I'm thankful that we, uh, the first cancer diagnosis and experience started that process for us of shaping our finances in such a way that allowed us to live our values when my daughter was born. So my daughter was born December 13th. We went to the hospital and never went home. Uh, food rotted in our refrigerator. Our car was left somewhere. Somebody else had to bring it home. Our house was a mess, my work was in chaos, and for 67 days, we— so when you go to a NICU, have you ever been? Okay, so one of the things they tell you is that the best thing for your baby is skin-to-skin contact, right? They need skin-to-skin contact with their parents. So I'm like, okay, job, skin-to-skin contact. And we just made that our job. 7, 10, 14 hours a day, my wife and I held that baby. Um, and we were able to live our values. I didn't have to leave. I didn't have to go to work. And, and I mean, we, we took steps backwards financially during that time period, but the reality is we had some income coming in from some rental properties and, and we were just, we were, our value was our daughter. My value was my daughter and my wife and their health and the fact that they needed me. And I did not have to compromise those values with my reality, which would have been, you know, paying my mortgage, not losing my house. So the peak experience of my life is that when my family needed me, I was actually able to be there without compromise. There are so many other people that I should give credit to, um, but there was a lot of people that supported us during that time. My parents, my stepfather made it his primary responsibility to drive my wife back and forth to chemotherapy treatments and feed us. They quarantined with us because it was during COVID You know, people made sacrifices for us. A dear friend of ours donated 6 months worth of breast milk that she pumped herself. You know, just— it's an incredible sacrifice. So we, we were blessed. Um, but that's, that's how I'm going to answer that question. I've lost your original question, but the peak, peak experience of my life was being able to live my values when it was kind of the, uh, when everything was on the line. Yeah.

Well, that goes right. It's the vertical one, vertical two, right? You just proved why vertical two of creating this system that we're not taught to be in. Going back to what you're talking about, the vocation versus a job.

Because the reality is like, I still— work and time don't have to be— like, don't have to be connected that intricately. Intricately. Work and time don't have to be connected. So I mean, I've done a boatload of work in the last year and a half, a boatload of work. And the year my daughter was born that we took 2 months off to spend with her, I still did a lot of work. It just wasn't tied to my time. Um, so yeah, when you just start to think about it that way and, um, what, what am I— and I think our whole society is, is, is trending towards a results-based work model, a, a value-add-based work model. Um, right. If, if I want a sandwich and to me that sandwich is worth $10, I do not care if it took someone 30 seconds or 2.5 hours to prepare that sandwich, its value to me is $10. So if they can prepare it in 10 seconds, I ought to still pay them $10. And that person who's getting paid $10 for 10 seconds is making like $6,000 an hour to make sandwiches. So that's like, that's a value-based system. So that's just— and our children are great at it. Children are entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurism is actually taught out of us, not into us. So if you give a child, like, try this, try this with your kids, right? Pay them to do a task. If they solve a problem for you, like putting the dishes away, and you give them $2, the wheels start spinning, and it won't be long before they come back and ask you, "Hey, how about the laundry? You need any help with the laundry? How about $2? I wonder if our neighbor needs help with her laundry." 2 bucks. They snow blow the drive— like, you take a 12-year-old kid, pay him to shovel the driveway. The very next— when he gets to the end of the driveway where the street is and he finishes the driveway, he's eyeballing the neighbor's driveway and the fact that it's got 2 feet of snow, and he's thinking to himself, I wonder if they'd pay me to, you know. And then it's not like those same— and this is a 12, 13, 14-year-old kid. The next thought he's gonna have within, you know, a couple of snowstorms, he's gonna be like, you know what, Johnny said he would work for $6 an hour. I wonder if I could pay Johnny to shovel my neighbor's driveway for $10, and then I'd be making $4 even if I'm not working, right?

It eventually clicks in.

Kids are entrepreneurial. Sure, entrepreneurism. Entrepreneurism is trained out of us, not into us. It's in our very nature. If you can solve a problem or add value to someone, you can probably get paid to do it, either in dollars or in other value—

Equity.

Equity or other value adds, right? We do it all the time. Like, kids are like, hey, if I help you climb to the top of the— slide on the playground, will you help me climb to the top of the slide on the playground? That is entrepreneurism. I solve a problem for you, there's an equity exchange there, you solve a problem for me. And our whole world like probably could operate without currency, right? You know, um, you know, currency is a super efficient way to operate.

But it's so interesting because, right, sitting here as a therapist, and I know you and I talked about your passion for bringing this back into families And I remember when I started going on this journey and then kind of taking stuff from my curriculum, from my program, the stuff that I was getting coached on and bringing it back into my family therapy sessions or my couple sessions or my individual sessions. And I remember once where it trickled down to a 5th grader who I was seeing. And I sat there and I don't think anybody's ever— right, you're going to school. It's like, well, what do you want to be when you get older?

Right.

And they're like, well, I want to be whatever. But asking someone like, what are you passionate about? Mm. And do you know your purpose? And this is like the thing, right? The start, the why, and the Simon Sinek, right? Everybody— there's a lot of things that unfortunately I feel like have gotten watered down over the last many years.

Mm-hmm.

Kind of like it's become— I always use this, it's like the Lululemon of— like you put on Lululemon pants and you're a yogi, right? So if you read like a Simon Sinek, there are all these amazing, amazing resources, and then people like, well, my why is 1 billion people that I want to— okay, but— that's not a— that's like an intangible thing for 9— what's your—

yeah, what's your why? And it's interesting. I'll go back to— you asked me about my background, right? Good at math in high school. Right? That's my background. So when you're good at math, you get steered, right? And I was steered towards my talents. Good at math? Hey, you should be an engineer or scientist. That's what people who are good at math should do. So I was steered towards engineering. It's only in the last like 6 months this has occurred to me. I never played with Legos. I never fiddled with cars. I was never into planes.

Musical instruments?

No, no. So I just—

I wasn't— You got ripped off.

I wasn't displaying the— people who are engineers tend to like to tinker, right? I was not a tinkerer. I actually had no passion for machinery at all, but I was good at math. So what happened there is I got steered towards my strengths, not my passions. So taking the time to ask a child or an adult that question, not what are you good at, what's important to you, what gets you excited, and realizing that that's not fixed either. It doesn't have to be fixed. So now I found a passion in finance, which happens to also be connected to mathematics, but it was just, it was so interesting to me to come to this realization over the last 6 months that I ended up for 6 years pursuing a path that I was, that was in alignment with my talents, but not my passions.

Yeah, and I wonder, like sitting and asking if we were asked as a kid, right? I, I mean, I was into sports, um, I loved music, still love music. Um, I think of all the things besides like not the social life kind of like crumbling during, during the pandemic, like not going to concerts for a long period of time was really heartbreaking for me. Um, but if we leverage these things, like people don't realize, and I see this a lot and I try to navigate this with my clients, which is the things that you're really interested in, and they talk about this here, right? What and, and, you know, what are your passions, what's your purpose, and finding that overlap and creating these little niches in your life. So when you started going into this other thing from engineering, like, what was some of the inklings of like, okay, I think I need to maybe express more of this, and some, you know, like, maybe I don't want to do this much longer, or how do I do A and start adding to B?

So that's a, a Another story, so before Aspen, my wife and I just gave birth to Aspen, she's 17 months old. I should not say my wife and I gave birth, my wife gets all the credit for giving birth, I stood and watched.

Participated for a few minutes.

Right.

Right.

So before Aspen, we had another child named Denver that we miscarried. So it was the first time that we had gotten pregnant, And I was working for the Department of Defense, 110 miles from where I lived. So I was spending almost 4 hours a day in the car, driving back and forth to work. And we had just found out we were pregnant. I was super stoked, super stoked. Called my mom at like 3 in the morning to tell her. I was super stoked. My wife's like, "We're not telling anyone." I drive in. Okay. I drive into the shipyard, right? Which is where I'm working at the time. It's a security checkpoint, right? I get up quarter of 3 in the morning and drive to work, get there 4:30. I've not seen a soul. My wife was a— so I haven't spoken to anyone. This is the day after the night, maybe. Okay, yeah, we're good. Uh, so let me start over, right? So we, uh, I go to work and after waking up at 2:45 in the morning, uh, arrive at work at 4:30 and I've not seen a soul yet. I have not spoken to anyone since I found out I was going to be a father. And there's this guy who works the security checkpoint at the shipyard, right? And every day people drive through, like 5,000 people drive through, right? And he's like, how you doing? Everyone's like, oh, you know, just another day, just another day. That guy did not know what he had coming. I rolled down my window, handed my badge. He's like, how you doing? I'm like, I'm gonna be a dad! Like, I was so stoked. Um, So a couple days later, and I've been in this perpetual state of a long commute, early mornings. A couple days later, I fell asleep at the wheel and did not get in an accident, but I had a close call. There was a tractor-trailer truck. It was just scary. It's the first time I've been in this. I've always been a drowsy driver, but this is the first time I've been in this position with these new, I'm gonna be a father, I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm a husband, I'm a father, these thoughts going through my mind. Didn't sit well with me. Went to work and like for the next week I drafted this long email to my wife on like, why, honey, I'm not passionate about what I'm doing. It doesn't align with our family values. I'm spending way too much time away from home and I'm going to be a father. Uh, we had just bought our second rental property at the time. Uh, we had just enough money. I mean, just, it was going to be so tight, but if, uh, if I left my job we could survive on my wife's income and those two rental properties by the skin of our teeth. And, uh, it was like she was waiting for me to send her that email. Got home that night, she's like, yes, absolutely, you want to be a real estate agent? Absolutely, why not? Like, I can't believe it took you this long to figure this out.

Um, so that's the beauty of a relationship. I know, like, come, dude, I knew that about you. Why didn't you know that about you?

And I— and here I am like, man, this is crazy, man. When I send this email to my wife, she's gonna go crazy. I go home and she's like, yeah, of course, why not?

Why haven't we thought about that? Like, I'm thinking about this as people are listening, or as I can bring this story back into my practice, right, of how many people are like, uh, yeah, like, I don't know why you took so long to figure that out. I already knew that about you, right? You know, right? But we're waiting for permission.

Yeah, and that's exactly what I was waiting for, was permission. So, um, yeah, so then, so she's like, yep, you're gonna quit your job, you get your real estate license, and you're going to be great at it. And, um and we're gonna have a family. So my, my last day at work was September 13th, Friday, September 13th, 2019. Wednesday, September 11th, 2019, while I was at work, my wife miscarried the baby, which was tragic in many ways, um, really devastating. But here I am, 2 days I'm leaving my job to be a father and we don't have a baby. And I don't even want to talk to my wife about it because she's grieving. But I'm like, honey, what do you want me to do? Like, do I still— do you want me to go through with it?

Or do—

because they would have kept me if I just said no, no, call it all off, I'll stay. She's like, no, I want you to do it. I want you to do it. Um, so that's— I don't even remember what question I'm answering, but that is how we arrived at, uh, full-time entrepreneurship and no W-2 job. And there were— there was an emotional roller coaster associated with, like, when I was for the Department of Defense, man, and I truly mean it when I say, if I could convert oxygen to CO2, I would have never been fired. As long as you don't screw up, you don't get fired from government employment. Sure. So here I am now, going from paycheck every 2 weeks to now weeks with utter failures, complete failures, weeks where I make more money than I've ever made before, weeks where I don't have a single client. I go and sit in the office for 40 hours and don't have a single showing. And now I'm dealing with these like emotions of, of like mountaintop experiences and valley experiences. Um, and for me, that's honestly one of the joys of being an entrepreneur. Every dollar that I've made since the day that I left my job, I've earned. Yeah. When you have a job, you get a paycheck as long as the C— as long as the company signs the check and you don't eff it up too badly, and you don't mess it up too badly. It doesn't really matter what you accomplish during the week. You get paid. Not so anymore. So I can tell you from personal experience, $1,000 that I earned from a W-2 income doesn't feel anything like the $1,000 that I earned.

That's so funny you're saying that. Lastly, so I— after we had this awesome— right, Ryan Serhant was here last night, and, um, I was just jazzed up from everything and being in this community, and, um, I think it was hanging out in the lobby with a bunch of guys. They're up to— I'm like, oh, it's 1:30, I gotta go to bed. Um, and then I still couldn't fall asleep till 2:30, and I saw my, um, for some of my clients it's through Square, right? So I process their credit cards, and I did it yesterday morning before I came to the conference to batch my last week's, uh, things. And I'm like, okay, so that took me 8 minutes to process all the credit cards. I didn't count, but I saw the number and like, oh, that's a nice little number. I didn't even have the mental perspective of like, well, I worked 6 or 8 hours for that money that just came in, but I know— but I'm more conscious of the amount of time it took me to batch and process the credit cards for that amount of money. I'm like, wait, so I just did 6 minutes of work for a couple thousand dollars.

It's, it's interesting, right?

I didn't even think about me doing this.

I'm—

what I'm doing on my show is the same thing I'm doing with my clients.

What you're capturing here is really important, and maybe this is a good nugget to leave your audience with. What you just described was you've broken the connection between— even though I'm assuming you more or less bill hourly for your time, right? But you have a private practice. You've broken the connection between your time and your income, um, which is super powerful, and you've broken it in your own mind. Um, and that's— so for me, it's the same thing. I'm more comfortable with working for free than I've ever been before, because I, I just— I, I know that if I add value, um, to people, to systems, to processes, to companies, if I just add value to the world, value will be added to me. Some of that value will be represented by dollar bills, but not all of it will be. And there's just something to be said for doing things, doing challenging things, solving problems, being helpful. Um, so that's like, that's a good nugget. I think that if we just pause here, pause here and leave. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because I think, number one, I know there's so much more I want to get into with, with you, one more of the process of where you're at now, how you got there, all the properties. Um, I think there's not enough easy extractable information from passionate people such as yourself. And number 2 is I know there's some other projects that you are working on that you were talking about, um, that I have an idea, you know, some ideas that we're probably going to brainstorm off air.

Yeah.

About what you want to bring to families and couples.

Yeah, absolutely.

All this stuff out.

Yeah.

So I definitely look forward to it.

Yeah, I'd be happy to chat again more on it, on an even more granular level, because a lot of what we talked about today was kind of bigger philosophy stuff.

That's that Gary Vee dance, right? Clouds and dirt and macro micro. And I think that like as people got an introduction to you right today. And, and I know that there's a lot of times where I'll have guests and like, oh, that was such a great guest. I'm like, well, okay, good. And I know they gave great information and they gave great energy, and then I'm like, but I want more, I want more. So I want definitely, yeah, maybe even if we can find some more time this weekend.

Yeah, absolutely. Cool, brother.

All right, thanks so much.

Thanks for listening to the You Winning Life podcast. If you are ready to minimize your personal and professional struggles and maximize your potential, we would love it if you subscribed so you don't miss an episode. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at You Winning Life.