Learning From Mentors, Overcoming Adversity, and Creating A Course That Helps Your Customers and Students Reach Mastery (Featuring Joe Polish and Joe DeMaria) - I Love Marketing Episode #357

The quality of my network is 50 times what it used to be. And it's because I don't have all this other crap in my life that I'm focused on. I just get to show up for people that I genuinely love. I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish and.

This is the I Love Marketing podcast.

Joe Di Maria, a young entrepreneur, longtime I Love Marketing listener and founder of Teach2Scale, kept failing and making bad decisions until he cracked the code on his business. Learn how he did it in today's episode of I Love Marketing with Joe Polish. Joe DeMaria helps world class entrepreneurs peak performers, coaches and speakers maximize, innovate and optimize their market and sales strategies. Joe Di Maria is a successful course creator, consultant and longtime listener of the I Love Marketing podcast. Before listening to the show, he says he couldn't figure out why his businesses kept failing. Now, hundreds of I Love Marketing podcasts later, he helps experts package their expertise into courses so people can learn to grow and reach mastery through their content. In this episode, Joe DeMaria will share how he walks his clients through the course creation process. You'll learn his Me ECE principle and how Sean Stephenson show inspired the process he now uses in his business.

Hello, this is Joe Polish and welcome to I Love Marketing. I'm here with a friend and a guy who's for some crazy bizarre reason has listened to several hundred episodes of I Love Marketing and his name is Joe Di Maria. He's also known as one of the top course creators on the planet and has unique talent with taking expertise and packaging it, amongst many other things which we're going to talk about. So, Joe, great to have you here. Explain what we're doing right now. I was going to do it, but I was like, you know what, I'm just going to put this on you. I'm going to have you explain who you are instead of me introing you, what the hell we're doing and what's going on right here.

Hey, so I'm Joe DeMaria. I've been listening to this show for a long, long time. I think I started in 2011 or 2012 and at the time I was broke, I was dumb. I basically failed in my business over and over again. I finally gave up and decided to open the podcast app and I typed in the word marketing because it was the one thing that I absolutely was just struggling with. Up popped your face and the whole I Love Marketing thing started for me and I from that time I probably binged a good 70 episodes. Over the next couple weeks there when I had that burning desire sort of thing to one day be in the Genius Network. I'd heard it over and over again. You kind of talked about it on the show. And I had, you know, I made the decision and the commitment that one day, somehow I didn't know when I didn't know where, I didn't know what was going to happen, but I'd be part of the group. And so I put years into it. And I applied everything from the Piranha Marketing book to the point where, like, we joked about it today, where I should have brought my consumer awareness guide and all the other stuff that I got from the original book. And now, you know, I'm lucky enough to be here with you in Squaw Valley at the Spartan Races, part of the Spartan Media Fest day as a guest of yours. And I get to do this podcast and kind of come full circle to my origin stories.

What I'd like for the listeners is there's a lot of people that can listen to podcasts and get entertained, maybe learn some ideas, learn some strategies and stuff. But it's one thing to how you interact with expertise, how you interact with knowledge and information and strategies. So what was the tipping point for you that caused you to hear something and then apply it, other than, you know, necessities of other invention? I mean, you needed to make your business work, so you're driven from that thing. But it's more like, how would you encourage people that are listening to not just listen, but to actually do something when they hear it, when they learn it?

I do a lot of teaching nowadays through our company. Teach to scale. And one of the biggest things that we always talk about is how to drive activity, not just engagement. You can have a lot of people engaged, and it won't change anyone's life if they're not actually taking an action. And I'll say, one of the special things about what you guys did, even the first few episodes, I think episode eight was like the profit activators or something. You introduced it really early on. Giving people something to go do in a simple way is the necessitator of a lot of those kinds of actions. So for me, you know, I always tell people that change comes from pain. You need to be more uncomfortable living and continuing to live the way you are than you would be making, you know, with the fear of change. Right. So when it's less scary to change than it is to continue living your life, life the way you're living it, that's typically when you'll have your transformation, I always tell the story, but I remember having my air conditioning be out. It was like, 98 degrees in San Jose. It's 93 degrees in my house, and I'm laying on the floor of my kitchen with my shirt off on the tile because it's the only cool thing in the house. So every time the tile gets warm, I roll over to another spot. And that's when I turned over and I opened the podcast app. And that's when I looked it up, and I was like, you know, it came from such a place of tremendous pain that it forced an action. And sometimes if you haven't taken that action yet, you haven't hit your bottom.

Yeah.

And, I mean, I know you know a lot about that, too. And one of the reasons I've always been so drawn to you is we had a conversation in 2012 about addiction, and it happened over LinkedIn, and I swear, you responded to me, like, once every eight months. So that conversation, literally, if you go look at it, starts in 2012 and ends in 2015. And it's like, eight messages. Yeah, but you shared with me all these amazing resources. You genuinely cared. You showed up for someone you didn't know, and it built this special thing. And it's part of why the whole Mount Olympus, when you're a broke idiot, laying on your floor is like spending 25 grand to go to the group. You know, it was a really special thing. But it does come from pain. It does come from the challenges, and you just need the right roadmap, because I'm certainly not smart. I'm certainly not the hardest worker in the world, but, you know, you always talk about the. You don't need the brains of an Einstein and the muscles of a Schwarzenegger. You gave me what to do.

Right.

And I think people miss that all the time. But you guys laid it out very simply, very beautifully early on. And honestly, I just listened and followed the directions.

No, well, thank you. It's very edifying, for one. Secondly, the big thing that I would like anyone listening to take away from that, I'll say the quote that you just mentioned. So it's from a book written years ago called the Book of Survival by Anthony Greenback. And he said, in order to get through an impossible situation, you don't need the reflexes of a Grand Prix driver, the muscles of a Hercules, the mind of an Einstein. You simply need to know what to do. And when someone knows what to do, they can do something with it. And since you did mention the 8 profit activator. So Dean Jackson, who I've done most of the I love marketing episodes with, who's my partner. And in this podcasting thing, he has great ways of framing stuff. And so when we were first starting the podcast, you know, he has before, during, and after. So you think of your business not just as, I want to build my business, but look at your business as having three separate units. There's a before unit, the during unit, and the after unit, which we talked endlessly about on I love marketing. But the eight profit activators first, starting with, you know, select a single target market. And if you want to really understand this, just go to ilove marketing.com, download the report, which is called Breakthrough DNA. It doesn't sell anything. It simply just lays out what Joe is referring to right now. And when I say Joe's referring to right now, I could actually even say that, like me, that I'm referring. But yeah, of course we're both named Joe. And that just sounds kind of weird. I just wanted to bring that up. It's this unspoken thing that's like this weird shit about having the same name with someone that you're interviewing. And you can just say random weird stuff like that, and someone will be like, what are you talking about right now? But it doesn't matter because we both have the same name. So that being said, go to ilove marketing.com, read Breakthrough DNA, and if you've been a longtime listener, I love marketing. I would encourage you to go back and listen to it because I think both of us, and I want to ask you about this thing I'm going to say right now, both of us can relate to you. Never step in the same river twice. There are books, like, for instance, I've more than halfway through listening to the audio version of Atlas Shrugged. 52 hours of audio, and I'm like, about 23 hours left reading Atlas Shrugged at 51 years old listening to it versus 20 years ago, 25. Totally different experience of how they. What a lot of people think of as genius is simply redundancy. The fact is you actually are, because you did. Because there's a lot of people that are so smart, or at least they think they are, that they are disabled as a result of their intellect. Right.

I'm being modest. I'm incredibly smart.

But, yeah, no, no, you are. And then. And I wanted to point that out. But here's the thing, though. I know what you're saying, and I try to, like, think, yeah, modest too. I pieced Together, all this stuff. But I never got a college education. I was a freaking drug addict growing up. I had all kinds of life challenges. I'm still littered with personal flaws and mental issues and all kinds of stuff. However, I look at who's doing something and just figured it out. What's the recipe that they're using? What can I learn from them? Because it takes genius to learn from the experiences of other people in some cases.

I think that's one of the things that I very early on realized I didn't know nothing or I didn't know anything at all. And I looked around and said, well, there's no way that any of the problems that I'm having are unique to me. And I think that realization, I mean, when you start a business and you're an entrepreneur, every time something goes wrong, you're sitting around going, like, how could this happen to me? How could this happen to me? How could this happen to me? All of us have the same three problems over and over and over again. And rather than try to innovate my way out of it, you know, I just looked for resources and people that had done it before, people that I could really model in my life and my business. And I don't remember if it was from you or if I got it from somebody that I was introduced to through your universe, which is most of the people I know now. But I got this concept of having a mentor in every aspect of my life. So I look and I have mentors in relationships. I have mentors in business. I have mentors in investing, But I also have mentors in just family, like how to show up for the people around you. All of that is based on just modeling people that, you know, have it figured out more than you do. And I think you have to surrender first to the understanding that a. You don't really need to have it all figured out. It's not your job to figure it all out. And that's the vulnerability that allows you to usually make connections with people that are willing to mentor you, willing to take you through and teach you this stuff. And a lot of it is surrender, and a lot of it's being humble enough to ask for the help.

We're going to take a commercial break here, which is a fake because I don't do commercials here. But I'm going to take the mic that's in front of you. I'm going to hand it to a mystery guest that we have over here. And see, we're at the Spartan World Championships, and we Have a guy who you're going to know, he's going to tell you who he is in just a second. He's done a couple hundred podcast episodes. He's been on a couple hundred episodes himself, you may have heard of him. And he is literally allowing us to utilize his equipment here, setting this whole thing up, which is super nice. So you should listen to his podcast, you may learn a lot. And he's gonna have me on his show and so this will be a sneak peek so you can go and listen to him interviewing me on his podcast. But he's first gonna tell you who he is and what he does. And just I wanna say thank you for setting this whole thing up for so.

You're absolutely welcome. I've been following you for some time. I have a lot of friends that John Vroman, Christopher Lockett, Tim Rhode, they speak very highly of you. So when I saw that you were gonna be doing a thing here at Spartan, I was like, oh my gosh, this is gonna be amazing. And I met you a couple years ago, I can't remember the event. I think you were just doing like a little speaking thing quick and then you were out like you had to bolt. But I really got to spend some time with you and you amazing human being.

Thank you.

My name is Sean Douglas, international radio show, host of Life Transformation Radio. It's a Internet radio show that's repurposed into a podcast. I'm active duty military, been military for last 18 years in the Air Force, two years before retirement. I've also built four businesses and just love what I do. This is, this is it for me.

So what I want to get into then with you, Joe, is your core skill now is you. I mean, you're, you're helping me and Alex Mendozian. In a few months we're going to be recording six strategy secrets 2.0, which is a course that me and Alex did in 2003 was when we did the first one. And it is truly to this day one of the best trainings, one of the best programs ever, because so many world famous marketers today have credited that course with helping them with what to do after somebody buys from you, after someone comes into your world. And so you're helping lay out the whole curriculum and stuff. And so there's a lot of people that have expertise and knowledge, but they have no clue on how to package it, how to think about it. And you do, that's what you know how to do. So if you could maybe talk to the person that is either already very successful and business owner, but they, they've never created a course or someone that's like, you know, I know stuff, but I have no clue where to start with any of this.

You know, the way I figured it out was just like anybody else going and doing it and sucking at it for a while and losing a lot of money and just having a, you know, a nightmare of trying to be a teacher. And there are a few things that I figured out over the course of the past few years that have allowed me to teach everything from high level jujitsu in an online course to network engineering, which is an extremely technical field. All manner of stuff in between, you know, meditation and all these soft skills to hard concrete skills. But realistically, one of the things that most people struggle with, and whenever I, I talk to a new potential client or you know, even a friend that's just struggling with it, it's always the layout. You know, the, the problem is it's not the actual shooting, it's not the editing, it's not even the membership site or selling it that gets everyone stuck. 80% of the people that try this never make it out of the gate because they're stuck in layers and layers of outlines and they're second guessing themselves. And the minute they think they have it right, they go back and they inject five more bullet points here and five there, and it ends up this cluttered, jumbled mess. So what we always teach people to do is throw out a traditional outline, because a traditional outline doesn't serve you. What you do instead is you think of it like a ladder. Right. So we always teach that everything should be in building blocks. So think of them as rungs in a ladder. If all of a sudden you swiped out one part of the ladder, the whole ladder collapses. So we always tell everyone to look at whatever you want to teach and whatever your course is, whatever you'd like. The first thing you should do is set a mastery goal. The mastery goal is exactly what you want them to achieve when they've left. Right.

So you want a really great idea.

Yeah. You want to begin with the end in mind, right? Yep. So after you have your mastery goal, then the idea is we, we figure out the ascension to get there. So when I say, okay, my mastery goal is to teach you how to make courses, well, then I want to reverse engineer that and go to what's the most basic level of understanding you would need in order to create a course. And that could be the philosophy. It could be setting the expectations the fundamentals, whatever you want to call that. Almost every course that we train entrepreneurs to make starts with a philosophical module, because so much of teaching is motivation, Right. So much of the reason why I was able to do anything with what you gave me is because the motivation was there. Right? Right. So that brings me to the next thing. You know, once you have your first rung on the ladder, I always ask this question, okay, now that I'd understand that, what's the next thing I would need to know in order to get to the next level? And basically, you keep asking that same question over and over again until you've reached your degree of doneness, right? So when I train this, I always tell people it's like baking brownies. So when you're baking brownies, right, that's.

What you drug brownies that have this.

If you add the step, right. That's. That's part of the philosophical part. You get really philosophical at the beginning with the baking brownies program. Whenever we give it as an example, we always say, yeah, the mastery goal is baking brownies. But if you really think about it, the first level of baking brownies is understanding how to use the oven, right? Because you have to understand how to use the oven. You have to know how to shop for groceries, how to mix the batter, how to throw it in the oven, and how to serve it. Right? Those are your five modules. Theoretically, those are the five rungs on your ladder. But at any point, if I were to remove the module before it, the whole thing falls to shit. If I teach you the whole course, but you never learned how to use the oven. You didn't learn. You didn't reach mastery. If I teach you everything, but I never teach you how to shop for it, and you just skip from knowing how to use the oven to mixing batter and doing whatever, you're gonna end up with a subpar product. Each thing there, it's called the MIES principle, or mece, and it means mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. It means every single module needs to be its own component, right? That's exclusive from all the other runs on the ladder, and together as a whole. It's collectively exhaustive in that it teaches everything you would need to reach your mastery goal. So that's why it's an ascension model. So we call it dynamic ascension training.

How did you learn that?

I actually learned it from Sean Stevenson on your show. So this is, again, like, a lot of my story, and it's part of why I'm, like, infinitely grateful to you. And again, it's Part of why it's kind of like a nerdy, fun moment for me to do this with you is a lot of my origin story and my lineage comes from things that I either learned from you or from people that were on your show and were introduced into my life, like some of the most special people in my life. I met a genius.

Yeah, that's the goal of Genius Network in Genius networking, is to connect these people together.

I mean, it's. It's proof positive of what you're trying to do and the impact that you have in the world. You know, we got the question today. When you're on, you're doing this sort of ask me anything about how you keep people coming back after they come to the first event. Right. The diminishing marginal return. And the fallacy around that is every time you go back to the room, you're meeting new people and you're deepening your relationships. Now, if you're going there to sell, then maybe, yeah, you'll overfish the river or whatever. But if you're going there to build relationships and to show up for people and to be an asset and a resource. I remember having to beg Dan Kishel to let me go the first time because I wasn't at the minimum. So, you know, he let me go, and I was like, dan, I promise, you know, I'm not going to sell anything. I'm just going to go try to. I'll shut my mouth or I'll help people. Those are the two things I'll do every time I've gone. I just go to help people and provide value. And because of that, I'm lucky enough to have, you know, a bunch of people from Genius as clients, a lot of amazing friendships, people I genuinely love and show up for, and they show up for me. And it's, you know, it's a beautiful thing. And that's why that diminishing marginal return thing is. It's all bullshit.

There's one thing, too, that for me and my experience is life gives to the giver and takes from the taker.

Absolutely.

And it's the more useful and the more generous, the more valuable you can be to the right person, the more it's going to grow. I mean, you can certainly expend energy on things that is not going to do anything for you, and it's going to exhaust you. But if you put energy, knowledge, wisdom, training, help service into things that expand, it will keep expanding. If you put it in the things and you're seeing contraction, it'll keep contracting.

It's one of the reasons why I became so passionate about the teaching stuff. You know, we kind of got off on the, on the Sean thing. But, you know, what happened was I was listening to your show and Sean was talking about how to be a more effective speaker from the stage. And he said every presentation from the stage should have some kind of story, some kind of activity, and then a takeaway or something like that. Right. And I was in the middle of my hellish first course where nothing made sense. I felt like I was a terrible communicator. I'll send you the videos sometimes because they're embarrassing as hell. Whenever people work with me, I always send them the videos of me doing my first one before they get on stage.

Just to show them that.

Yeah, just to show them. Like, you see me flop sweating with my hair melting in my face, and I'm like stammering the whole time. I'm miserable. It's 150 degrees in the room. I mean, it was the worst possible experience you could imagine. And so I'm sitting there in Sacramento.

You sure this was 150 degrees?

It was, it was ridiculous. It was a small black room the size of the world's worst storage unit. And we were using halogen bulbs on racks that were like, oh, it was the most miserable thing in the world. And you were in there for seven or eight hours.

Yeah. And you're supposed to be having your brain, like operating in a functional manner during all this nonsense.

Try operating your brain inside of an Easy Bake Oven. That's what it felt like. I felt like a half cooked cupcake, like it was the worst thing in the world. But, you know, I go home from that. I've lost all this money on this course. It's never going to see the light of day. And it never did. Besides me, you know, showing people to make them feel better. I'm listening to the podcast in the pool at my shitty apartment complex. Sean starts mentioning this thing and it's like a light bulb where I go, if it's working from the stage, why wouldn't it work as a premise, at least in a course? And I went back into my apartment. I rewrote the entire programming. I rewrote all of the curriculum for that product.

Wow.

Around that idea that every single thing I teach should have a visual component, a kinesthetic component, and an auditory component. And I went in right away. And it worked. It just, it made more sense. It flowed. Then I said, okay, well, that worked for a marketing Course, maybe I could try it on something a little bit different. So then I did it with kickboxing and jiu jitsu. That was my test, was, can it work for all types of learning? Well, I've done it for physical stuff. I've done it for bodybuilders. I've done it for health programming. I've done it for meditation. Now I've done it for business opportunity stuff, but also network engineering, a really complicated skill. I've done it in all these different modalities. It's the same system every time. And the amazing thing is that it just. It works. And, you know, I am a massive introvert. Like, I get terrified of speaking, I'm terrified of being on camera when I started, and it actually was like the safety blanket that I created for myself because I knew that I didn't have to be the world's best speaker. I just had to know my own story, right? And it's personal to me, so I can tell my own story, right? Even under pressure, I can tell my own story. And then the amazing thing was, everyone I ever worked with were not natural on camera. If you had them just start going on camera, they would be terrible, right? But if I told them to just look at their lesson plan, and lesson five in module four is, you know, whatever this title. And all they had to do is look at their three things. Their story, their activity, and their point. All we had to do was record the story, right? So now it's easy for them. It takes all the pressure off, and they just record their story. And maybe it takes them one or two times to feel comfortable, but when they get in that groove, and that's something I learned from Dan Kennedy actually was moving in columns, not rows. You know, he had the whole thing about get two people, and they're each gonna write January 1, 2000, February 2, 2001. One guy moves left to right, the other guy moves January all the way through to December1, all the way through 12, 2000, all the way to 2012. The guy moving linearly, like in columns, will finish twice as fast. So we did the same thing. We recorded all the stories. That way, you're not switching modalities in your brain saying, okay, now I have to tell a story, now I have to do an activity, now I have to do a point. We just had you do all of your stories, and then we cut it all together. I mean, the thing that we did was we bought one of those classic movie slates. You know, the thing where they go and action and it like, clicks, right? And all we did was just write lesson one A. And that would be the story. Lesson two a story. And then when we did all the activities, It'd be lesson 1B. When we did all the takeaways, lesson 1C. And then we just cut them all together at the end. And it took all the pressure off of the people that were on camera, and it made them happier. They were more natural because they were telling their stories. The comfort level was just. It was there. And I felt like we were really onto something. But, you know, I had a massive amount of gratitude to Sean for that for years. I mentioned it to him on a couple occasions. And, you know, obviously we lost shot.

Yeah, we lost Sean recently. Very sad. But he was a genius.

But it was something that I wanted to talk about this year at Genius with him because it was like, you know, I'm very. Lineage is very important to me.

Yeah.

So because of you, I know Alex Mondojian. Because of you, I know all these amazing clients of mine, all these people that have been referred or refer other people. I pay attention to lineage, and that's really important to me. And just like this thing that I'm now becoming, more and more, I have more and more notoriety over this course curriculum thing. It's because of you, and it's because of Sean, and it's all the way back to 2011, laying on the floor, giving up, surrendering, and just looking up marketing on the podcast app. It's all from the same thing that lineage is all from the same place.

So there's a couple things I want to point out with what you said. For one, you laid out a success process for people to do. Secondly, it also shows the reason why packaging up your know, how getting it to people in a way that they can benefit from it can literally be a defining moment in someone's life. So if I didn't sit down and record a podcast that you weren't able to do a search for and find it, who knows what?

I'd probably be dead. I'd be in a ditch somewhere.

You know, if we could go back and, God, it'd be really an interesting sort of weird human experiment. If you could, like, go back to the, you know, back in time and just not let you listen to that podcast and then trace what would happen to you and see just how long would you have lasted me weathered it?

Oh, it wouldn't happen. I mean, one of the. The amazing, like, let me just preface this for anyone listening that thinks that I'm saying That if you just listen to what Joe says, that life isn't hard and it doesn't suck and you don't get screwed over. I got the crap kicked out of me for years, even after I started doing the right things. But I had the end in mind, and that was totally different. You know, I had a. I had a journey and I had a path that I could follow. So even when things were going wrong, I wasn't second guessing the journey. And I think the big issue that most people get into is if they lack direction, right, Then they go off on 50 different tangents and they end up, you know, walking in a circle in the forest or walking in a circle in the desert for 40 years or whatever, and they miss all these great opportunities just because they don't have the right heading. So I was screwing around and I did a terrible job still, but my heading made it so that a decade later, I still got here.

Yeah, yeah, right, Absolutely. Look, I mean, if I had not learned marketing, and specifically direct response marketing, and had to rely on my management skills or sales ability, and, I mean, there'd be no way I would have been able to pull off running what, you know, a multimillion dollar business now and all the people I've impacted and all the cool stuff, because, you know, I had a caring attitude. I did my best to be positive, but I just didn't know what the hell to do. It goes back to the Anthony Greenback thing, and when you actually learn that, it's such a beneficial thing. So you mentioned, like, difficulties earlier today. We were walking to the Spartan building. Well, when I say the Spartan building, we're in Lake Tahoe and ships. Shit's everywhere.

Yeah.

Like, everything Spartan. So they've kind of taken over. And we're talking about how both of us have had people that we have really helped and have stolen our stuff. You know, in my particular case, you know, a guy that. There's been no single person more responsible for his business success than me. I mean, literally hundreds of millions of dollars. And this same guy plagiarizes, steals my stuff and does all of this, which if he would have just asked me for permission in collaboration, I would have said, yeah, how can I help you? Because that's just how I've always been. And it's this massive form of betrayal. And the reason I'm bringing this up is that no matter how much you try to do good, you're gonna get. It's like the Mike Tyson thing. Everyone has a plan until I punch him in the Face.

Right.

And so, you know, we're all gonna deal with shit. Even, you know, this year has been incredibly bizarre. And we're in crazy. I mean, from betrayals to having Valley fever, which, if you don't know Valley fever is. You can look it up. It's something that people in Arizona, New Mexico and California can get. Sean Stevenson passing away. I mean, it's been a rough year relative to other times in my life, even with incredible growth, even with stuff. So more than anything, whenever I do podcasts, we talk about the business strategy, the business methodology, your ability to weather the storms, is how well you keep your shit together. And why say keep your shit together? I mean, I lose my shit all the time. Right. I just mean, you know, being able to get back on track when you get knocked off track. I mean, I think life, success is a function of. You're on track because you're doing things in a certain way, and then stuff happens. You can get an illness, you can have a breakup. You know, I had a breakup with a partner earlier this year that happened as a result of looking back in it and had nothing to do with anything that I regret that I could have, should have, would have done. It's just, you know, one of these sort of things. So the point is your ability to take the areas of life that don't work, find the thing that does is what's going to determine your business success, your longevity. And so much of it is simply having an attitude that even when you were down and out, which you referenced and talked to, you still had that winning attitude, even when you probably felt like a loser and life didn't matter.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we talked about your 2019 was basically my 2017 and half of 2018.

Yeah.

Where I was just. It felt like everything had gone wrong. Like I'd thrown away a decade of building everything. I felt like I was basically starting over again. I think most people, and I actually, I know this now because I again, I had to be humbled enough to go and speak to people that I respect and that I love. Alex was one of the big ones, and I told him, like, I screwed this up. I made the wrong choices in my business. I made the wrong choices for a partner. I made the wrong choices at all these different things. And I went from doing, you know, like, thinking we really had this shit figured out, to all of a sudden not being able to pay for my parking to leave my office. That is such a huge swing of fortune that I think it's. You have to almost Be stupid to still believe in yourself at that point. Right. And I know that everybody had kind of. I kept getting told, you know, just go, go work for somebody else. Go do, you know, you know, sales, you know, marketing. Go work for someone else. Go build their business, and you'll be just fine. It was a point where I, again, I still knew my heading.

Right.

I still knew where I wanted to go, and no matter how shitty it was. And, yes, I had to do a lot of things that were extremely painful. I lost a relationship. I downsized. I got rid of my place. I ended up having to move in to my aunt's house for, like, two months while I was figuring other shit out, because I literally had all of the money that I'd made in the five or six years prior to disappeared overnight. Like, gone to where? Like, I told you the story, but I was trying to leave my office building on a Saturday. The max that the parking is on Saturday and Sunday is $5. And when I went to pay it, my card got declined and I had four or five cars behind me. People that see me every day at my office who thought things were going great because, well, they were a couple weeks prior. They're all the people that I now have to get out of my car, tell them all to back out so I can back up the ramp and check my app, my banking app. And I have $2.86 in my account, and it's how I figured out that everything was gone.

Yeah, right. It's kind of like a pretty bad, fraudulent sort of thing.

There were so many things that happened over the course of those few years that I feel like, you know, I probably should have seen it coming.

Yeah.

But again, you know, I'm. I'm a young entrepreneur, so I'm going to make a lot of really shitty decisions. And I'm actually. I'm actually okay with it. I've never really held it. I mean, the betrayal is there, but I've never really, like. I'll never say names. Realistically. It's a huge learning lesson for me. It's a huge opportunity for me to come back, practice resiliency, go back to the things that made me successful, keep it simple, and really reconnect with the things that are important to me. What was really important to me that I forgot about was the people focusing on my network, on my friends. And since that's happened and since I was forced to start over at the beginning of last year, I have had my business blow up. It's way more profitable than it Used to be. It's smaller than it used to be, but it's way more profitable than it used to be. It's scaling three or four times faster than it used to. And the people I work with are amazing people that I genuinely love. Whereas I used to make money, but I used to also fucking hate everyone I worked for because they were all Silicon Valley jerks and it was all startup game and it was all. It was just fake. But now I work with people like. And I'm sure they won't, like. Jim won't mind, but, you know, I work with Jim Do. I love Jim do genuinely as a person. Jim's an amazing guy, great human. Supporting Jim do is something that I love to do.

Yeah.

Working with Lee Richter is something that I love to do. Yeah. So the quality of my network is 50 times what it used to be. And it's because I don't have all this other crap in my life that I'm focused on. I just get to show up for people that I genuinely love. That's a Jay Abraham thing. Another acolyte sort of thing for me. Right. Is fall in love with your clients. Fall in love. That's how you're going to go out and really make an impact and grow again. As Jay would say, geometrically. Right. That's the thing. The secret that I have is just listening to people that are smarter than me. I listen to you. It worked out. I listened to Jay. It worked out. It's a respect thing and it's knowing that I'm young, I'm going to make a lot of stupid mistakes. But I've hit on a few things that really work and they work for a lot of people. I'm extremely grateful for that. But it's the opportunities I was given that allowed me to do that. I didn't make any of this.

So here's what I would say to kind of summarize some of the key things. There's a lot here, but you certainly laid out a methodology, a plan and a path on how to put together, put together courses. The other is how to think about and deal with adversity. The other is learning through other people and through their expertise and seeking out people that have been there, done that, and not trying to overthink it or change it. Just following it is, you know, follow the recipe card as close to recipe card as you can. And also knowing that no matter how well you try, whatever your best of intentions are, shit will happen. And don't think it's not going to. And there's plenty of reasons that someone could give up or whatever. You know, this is to get all. Eckhart Tolle is sure. You know, he has this one great line where he says, you know, here's a spiritual practice for you. Don't take your thoughts so seriously. And when things are going bad, we can often ruminate on how horrible our lives are and stuff. And I was just reading an article a couple days ago about this woman, and I remember when it first happened. She had a face transplant seven years ago because her husband, whatever sort of horrendous evil human this guy was or whatever, manufactured this sort of destructive person. He poured lye on her and literally, you know, wanting to kill her. And it burned 80% of her body. She burned her face off. She had a face. I mean, just the woman scarred had a face transplant. And this woman has had just nothing but a years of suffering and surgeries and pain and all kinds of stuff. And I was reading an article about how her body's rejecting the face transplant and she's got infections and all of this stuff and multiple surgeries in constant pain, and how she's still optimistic. She just, like, recently, because of the affection, she went blind and lost her. And I'm sitting there going, man, you know, I hear so many of my motivational, like, colleagues, you know, life is tough and this and that. It's like, man, you know, there's some shit I can't even hand what other people deal with.

Absolutely.

And now, that being said, people ask me, why do you read books? Why do you listen to podcasts? Why do you go to seminars? Why? Well, for one, it keeps me up. I mean, it keeps me in an up state, meaning it's fuel in a positive way for my brain, for my mindset, for how I do stuff. And also, I don't ever want to think that, oh, you know, life is so insurmountable. I mean, we are very resilient if we condition and train ourselves to deal with stuff. And so one of the biggest takeaways that I get from this conversation is that just how you deal with it and how you think about that stuff. But more so, you're not arrogant. You know, you're like, I'm a young entrepreneur. I'm going to make mistakes. It's like, yeah, and some people, they never get started. They never really do what they can because they're so worried about screwing up. And the thing is, is you don't learn anything when things are working all the time.

Right?

I mean, you. Your biggest Breakthroughs are typically going to come out of areas of life that don't work and then you're forced to actually have to transform those things. So that's one of, you know, one of the things that I admire about what you've been going through. And if I could fast forward 10, 15 years from now to see where you're at and where you become, because I think it's just going to be huge, which is good. So what I'd like to do as we wrap up here, how can people seek you out if they want to get your expertise or your help, either through a course or through your own personal, you know, if someone's a high level entrepreneur, because that's kind of who you're working with now are people that want to put together courses, how can they get more of you?

You can find us@teachtoscale.com so t e a c h t o scale.com and you can always jump into my company office hours. Every Friday we're on our Zoom link for two hours. Anybody can come in and ask questions. So that's Fridays at 8am Pacific to 10am and that Zoom link is teachtoscale.com zoom. So every Friday I sit in that link and I kind of just, you know, I work and do my normal stuff and I'll have clients or I'll have friends, I'll have people that are interested in working with us pop in and ask questions about, you know, how to be better teachers, how to create their course. We can review content they've done and you know, it's just one of the little services that I do kind of in the similar vein to what you do is just making ourselves available to try to make a difference. Our big goal is to try to create 1 million ethical teachers by 2025. Awesome. There's a lot of unethical teachers and very many.

Yeah, lots.

And you know, it's, it's for every guy like me that's out there right now. There are hundreds of people in Genius Network and War Room. And I'm kind of calling you out right now, but Genius Network, War Room, all these amazing high level rooms around the country. You all have people like me 10 years ago waiting for you to go out and say something and give them direction. And you putting that aside, I mean, Joe, you talk about moral obligations, you have the moral obligation to show up for those people. It doesn't take a lot of your time. When you're done with this thing, it's going to sit there on the Shelf and it's automated. You don't have to do a lot with it. So after you sync the time in, you now have this evergreen piece that can go out and actually make a difference. And for a lot of you, you already have the money. I hang out with you. I know you got the money. So it's not about the money. You're not trying to make money on the course necessarily. You're trying to raise your impact. You're trying to do something that really matters. And that is why we call it teach to scale. You're scaling your impact, you're scaling the business, you're scaling your reach in the world. And honestly, if you didn't teach me and if you didn't share the way that I'm trying to help other people share, I mean, I wouldn't have scaled.

Yeah, your, your footprint is going to be on a lot of the future work that I do too, that you're helping with. And if you want to meet, if you want to meet Joe and other people that are awesome, come to the Genius Network annual event. If you're an entrepreneur that is a high level entrepreneur, you can check it out@gieniusnetwork.com when stick strategy Secrets comes out, we will probably do another episode about how we actually assembled it so we can describe to people how we're putting a program together so you can see a little bit of behind the scenes. So is there anything that I didn't ask you or anything that I should have that you'd like to mention or any famous last words?

You know, I think my famous last words in this case would probably just be, you know, it's not going to work, so just keep trying.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Thank you, sir. And thank you, Sean.

Thank you. Yes, thank you, Sean, for letting us do this in Squaw Valley. It's awesome. Spending the time with Joe Dissent has been really great too. And you know, we're meeting a lot of really fun people. So getting the opportunity to do this with you, Joe, is also a real pleasure. Obviously it's something that I've. When I was first starting out, I had the dream and the vision that one day we'd be able to work together. And it's been, you know, a sort of self actualizing thing the past year to work with you and get to know you better as a, as a person too. And so it's an honor for me and I have genuine love for you and I hope you know that.

Thank you. Yes.

I love you too.

You're awesome. And so to everyone listening out there. Now go do something useful with your life and take the advice that he provided. And whoever's the closest loved one to you right now, tell him how much you appreciate him because it always makes people feel good. So have a great day. We'll talk to you on the next episode and see ya.

If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event or to apply, go to genusnetwork.com don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today@ilovemarketing.com subscribe if you'd like to access the video, show notes or the exercise to help you take action on what was discussed, please visit ilovemarketing.com 357.