Want To Live The Life of Your Dreams? Watch This! Feat Darren Hardy

So the question I'm asked most often is, with all the fascinating, interesting people that I get a chance to meet and study and spend time with as publisher and editor of Success magazine, who are my favorites. And so what I want to do today is to tell you not just my favorite, but the one that had the most impact in my life and in the financial results and in the personal results of my life, having had the chance to spend time with this unique individual. And it came from meeting a man on a plane. And we got to talking and he started to tell me about his grandfather, who had just turned 100 years of age. So he was a centenarian, which I was fascinated because I had never met a centenarian. And the story was, is that he had immigrated from what used to be the Soviet Union, which is now the Ukraine, to the United States with his family. And. And they grew up in abject poverty. They lived in the basement of another family's home his whole growing up years. And because they couldn't afford to sustain themselves, he couldn't go to high school. And so he never went to high school. Yet he went on to become extraordinarily wealthy, well respected and very well loved. And so for me, that's the trifecta of success. Wealthy, well respected, and very loved. And so I asked if I could get his grandfather's phone number and if I could call him on the phone and see if I could inquire about doing an interview. And so he passed me his grandfather's number. I called him on the phone and finally got him on the line and said, I would love to sit down and interview him and publicize his story and success. And he said, no, not a chance. He's a very, very private person and didn't want that kind of publicity. And so I switched my marketing mind and said, but we could document all the lessons that you learned of a hundred years of wisdom, and you could pass it down to your children as a how to live the kind of extraordinary life you've proven so that maybe great, great, great grandchildren who never get a chance to meet you could learn the same lessons. And he seemed to get inspired by that idea. But so I said, I will help memorialize that for you if we spend some time together. So I said, before we get together, I would ask that you write down everything you possibly learned that contributed to your extraordinary life on paper. Okay? Just prepare your notes for it. And he seemed very committed. He said, I'll give this some very diligent thought and I'll Be prepared for our meeting. And so the day the interview came and I was excited, I don't get excited about a lot of interviews because I have to do so many of them, but this one just had some sort of a mystique and magic to it. So I remember pulling up to the big iron gates as they slowly opened up, and then I start driving up the horizon. And as soon as I got over the horizon, I could see this palatial estate, which meant this guy was obviously wealthy. And I park my car and I go to the front door and I'm greeted by his estate manager and then shown to the library. And I walk in this room and it was absolutely breathtaking. Polished mahogany wood, two stories, wall to wall, floor to ceiling books, rare books as well as contemporary modern books, maybe by many of you in this room, which was another indication that this is a man who, while never went to high school, is a serious student. So in the middle of the room were these two vintage wingback load leather chairs, creased just perfectly like out of a Ralph Lauren catalog, and a marble table in the middle. And even as I tell you the story, I could smell the leather of those two wingback chairs. So I took my seat and put my recording device down and my journals that I had come and the pens to wait for this deluge of wisdom that I was going to get from this man. And he eventually walks in and his skin is translucent, wrinkled. He's obviously old, but he's got this grace about him that obviously you don't acquire unless you've walked for nearly a million hours on this planet. And when I shook his hand, I knew in that moment this was going to be something special. And so when he sat down, I said, so did you get a chance to write down all the wisdoms of 100 years of living? And he said, oh, yeah, I did. And I said, well, where is it? Because I expected a big thick stack of documents. And he said, oh, I have it. And he reached into his breast pocket, said, it's right here. And he handed it over to me and I took it and I opened it up and I read it in about 30 seconds because it was only 2/3 filled out. And I said, that's it. And I realized then that I was being disrespectful. And I said, well, how is all this no way that all this is possible with what's just on this piece of paper? And he smiled knowingly and said, that's the problem, is that you could hand this piece of paper to A young man. And they will open it, and they will read it, and they will think that they understand it, but they will disregard it. And they will go on looking for more fanciful, complicated, seemingly mysterious ideas in order to capture their success. And he said, it won't be until somebody arrives 100 years later when they're contemplating their life and trying to make sense of it, that they will then reread this piece of paper and say to themselves, that was it? Everything you ever needed to know to be extraordinarily wealthy, well respected, and very much loved appears on this piece of paper. And he could tell that I was stunned and stunted by this idea. And so he went on to explain. He said, look, you know, because I never went to high school, I wasn't very smart. And I thought that was a disadvantage. And so every endeavor I pursued, I just had to find out what were those few things that made this work. And because I thought I wasn't very smart, I didn't change them. I didn't try to adapt them and make them my own. I just did them. And then because I did them over and over again, I got really good at them. And the thing that I thought was my disadvantage became my great advantage. And the first thing that was written on this piece of paper was only a few things matter to anything. And he told me, and we went on for another two hours. And I don't think we talked about anything else that was on this piece of paper, but about this one concept. And that is, you want to find those few things, and then you want to stick to them, and then you want to master them. And you see, I think at this point of the conference, you've been given so many ideas, and we're always looking at the bleeding edge. What's new, what's novel, what's shiny. And this, I think, is a really important reminder that when it comes down to it, when you go back to your businesses or your relationships or your lives, in the end, only a few things matter. So I want to unpack this for you. I remember watching a Stephen Hawking's documentary, the Grand Design. He's trying to explain the cosmos and the universe. And he said, you can understand the cosmos, the universe, and complicated systems like the brain, because they all boil down and are governed by a few simple principles. A few simple principles govern the entire universe and the cosmos, as well as the brain. And when you understand those simple principles, you now know how to make sense of and govern and master these complicated systems. And so that's what I want to help you discover. So let's talk about finding the guy that really helped me find what really matters is when I interviewed this guy, Dr. Oz, and at the time that I interviewed him, he was, you know, running, you know, the nonprofit organization, best selling author, and he was still doing 200 open heart surgeries. And I asked him, I said, how is it that you possibly are able to get all this done much more than me. And he was always relaxed and at ease. And he said, look, anything that you do, there's only a few things, there's a few vital functions, even open heart surgery, there's hundreds of procedures that are done before I come in. And then I do two or three things, and those two or three things matter the most of whether the patient lives or dies. And I focus only on becoming masterful at those two or three things when I do them, then I leave the rest of the capable team. Same thing with running a television network, running a non profit organization, all the rest, that's finding your vital few functions. Then when it comes to focus or sticking to them, this is the guy that I really learned this from. When asked what is the most of any revolutionary product you or Apple's ever created, what are you most proud of? His answer was, I am as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do. And then he went on to explain, People think focus means saying yes to the thing. You have to focus on what. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the other hundred good ideas there are. You have to pick carefully. So saying no to the thousand things is your key to success. And when asking Warren Buffett if you could boil your success down to one key principle of all, the oracle, The Oracle of Omaha knows about investing and building wealth. What would be your 1 key to success? He said, for every 100 great opportunities that are brought to me, I say no 99 times. So I hope that in this brief period of time, taking 100 years of wisdom and boiling it down into 10 minutes, that you don't wait till you get to 100 years before you truly understand that in any endeavor, in any activity, in anything you're pursuing success in, there are only a few things that matter. Don't leave the field of the few things that matter to chase the novel, the new and the exciting, because ultimately you'll leave success on the table. Thank you all very much. What are some of the most important elegant wealth ideas that you discovered since you wrote the four Hour Workweek which was a huge bestseller. Elegant wealth ideas. God, I don't know. Well, I'll focus on the elegant parks. There are so many people here who make so much more than I do on an annual basis. You can talk about life hacks too, if that's easier. No, I'll talk about wealth because I think wealth is a miss. It's an under examined word. Success, another one. So terms that are used so often in so many contexts that they lose any specific meaning and therefore I think lead to a lot of sloppy, imprecise thinking. So I think wealth in a way is having a sustainable way of maintaining your capital and simultaneously appreciating everything that you have and do. I think it's impossible that you can have riches without appreciation. So you focus 100% on achievement. You can't have wealth without a commensurate 5050 blend of appreciation with achievements. I'll give a tip on that. And it's so simple actually. One of my readers created something called the five Minute Journal. And you can just google it, you'll find it. Yeah, uj, yeah. And every morning grab your tea or coffee, whatever and just fill out these five minutes, starting with three things that you're grateful for. And there's so much research, I'm not going to beat you over the head with it. You can look at all sorts of research into compassion, meditation and gratitude lists and exercise gratitude, its impact on self reported well being. It's very high. There's pretty much nothing you can do that is higher. So that's number one is journal in the morning or use something like the Five Minute Journal. And what I've realized for myself is, and this is a very personal thing, I think that a business can be optimized for maximal, let's say per annum income, but it can be maximized for other things as well. And one of my favorite philosopher kings in the world of entrepreneurship is Derek Sivers and Sivers Dot. I think it's just sivers dot com or Sivers dot co. He is definitely one of my role models. And he's a master programmer, just a virtuoso of programming, but started a company called CD Baby, sold it for $27 million. And that might not sound like a lot of money to some people here, but the way he's crafted his life is just fascinating. And he's a programmer, right? So he was very shy, didn't know how to overcome his fear of being extroverted. So I'm not kidding. He became a ringleader in a traveling circus I mean, like this guy is a real character and he has a book, I think it's just called Anything youg Want and it's extremely short. I've read that book dozens of times. You should read it just in terms of again, not just effective solutions, but elegant solutions. The fewest number of moving parts, fewest number of complications. The guy is amazing. And for me personally, the way he views a company is it's an opportunity or a business to create utopia as you would like to see it. So for me, I go, and you know this, and of course we could have a long conversation about this, but I go either super low end in cost, meaning free. I put out more than 500 blog posts for free. I do tons of stuff for free or very high priced. Like that event I did a couple years ago and it was $10,000 a seat. And because I've established so much goodwill and trust with my audience and the recommendations I give them, work and so on I put up. I remember talking to someone who ran events and this is, this is many different events are run different ways. But in my particular case, events are a lot of work. And putting on the event was a lot of work. But what wasn't a lot of work was filling the event. I put up a 750 word blog post and the entire event was full 48 hours later. And it was about $10,000 a person, 200 seats, just like that. So I like doing extremely. I like doing free or extremely low cost or very, very high cost. And I find that the former maximizes my enjoyment of interacting with my audience and establishing goodwill and testing things and doing experiments, experiments. And the latter provides income with a minimum of headache. So those are a few things that come to mind. No, that's sort of my model too. I do the same thing. I just want to add one more thing. So investing. I view investing as allocating resources to increase your quality of life or the quality of life of those people around you. So what I realized for myself, I hate public markets. So if I buy stock, I just watch the. I watch the charts like a crackhead. It is so unpleasant for me. So that if I'm defining investing in that way, it's defeating the purpose of investing. And I think you need to find a form of investing of allocating resources that in and of itself does not create anxiety that negates a potentially positive outcome. You're a smoked crack. Or you're just making that analogy to like, you assume what it's like for someone to look at stocks Like a crackhead. You know, it's an assumption. I've done plenty of drugs, but not coke, not crack. Actually, let me rephrase that. Not crack. You could do the four hour crackhead. I mean, there's no telling. Big market. Big market. Yeah. There's no telling where you can take it. That would have to be a freemium, You know. Oh, I do want to mention something that you talked about with the gratitude I have to shout out for Dan Sullivan. They have strange strategic coach has an app that I use called Win Streak where you just literally. It's a downloadable app, free. You can just write whatever you're grateful for. What are the wins? And do three of them a day. It's pretty awesome. Simple takes, but it programs your brain and it's getting yourself to follow the simple stuff. So I heard someone tell me recently, they said intelligence is what it is. Wisdom is taking your own advice. They're like, wisdom is just taking your own advice, doing what you know you should be doing. And I was like, huh, that's really interesting. Like how many people here. How many people here think they should floss regularly? How many people here floss every day? Jesus. You bunch of overachievers. Yeah, Liars. All right, so I can't imagine how someone doesn't. I mean, I have literally religiously got my teeth cleaned every six months minimum for the last 26 years. And I carry. I even have it. Look, I think I might have taken it off. You might be able to use that bathing suit for it. I could. No, seriously. So what do you think of my wallet? My hello Kitty wallet? I like it. I think I'd left it. Yeah, no, I literally. Because it wouldn't be. So you have floss. I did. No, I do have the cards, the dental. I've hit the one place on the planet where like everybody apparently flosses. We could choose another behavior, whatever that is. Okay. You can use platforms tools like Lyft. Dot Lyft. I was brought in by EV Williams, who's co founder of Twitter to invest in this company they incubated called Lyft, which is all about behavioral change. And there are different tools, but how do you. What tools can you use to take your own advice to do the things you know you should already be doing? Because I think that if you just focused on the stuff you already know you should do, and no new to do items whatsoever, you'd be very well served. So look at ways like this app like Lyft that you can hold yourself accountable. Where I was going with that is that lift is the only thing that got me to floss regularly. I hate flossing. It's just like every time I do it, I feel like I got mugged. I'm just like, my gums are violently rioting back. But anyway, so this got me to. Is your life so soft and cushiony that it needed to go to that level psychologically where. That's my big problem. Floss. Yeah. No, I've got other stuff. I've got other stuff. No, no, that's why I have black water. No, that's. That's good. It's like the little things, though. It's a great point. So what is a question I didn't ask you but would be worth at least $250,000 to everyone here if I had asked it? How do you make decisions? It's a big question. I would read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. Maybe it's the Other way around, which was recommended. I was at a tech roundtable with Obama and he's like, you know what book all you guys need to read? I'm like, wow, that's what they need on the back of the book cover. But that's a tremendous book. And secondarily, I think Stoic Philosophy is one of the best operating systems conceivable for making. Making effective and efficient decisions in high stress environments. So I would say stoicism. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description, or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. So it was November of 2006. It was actually the day before Thanksgiving. And we're getting into our Bentley because he's talking about being rich. And, you know, we're about to drive down from Park City, Utah, to a place not so rich called Price, Utah, where I'm from, little coal mining town. And as we start driving, we're going through this great canyon, Spanish Fork Canyon, Just great Valley. Awesome trees, awesome day. And you know what? My wife and I have our best conversations on these kind of drives. And that's how the conversation started out. She was telling me that I was an extraordinary radio show host and an extraordinary speaker, which. Don't judge that. That's my wife talking, right? And she just kept saying extraordinary for a Few things I'm feeling damn good at this time. And then she looks over at me and says, but you're just an ordinary husband and father. Yeah. Moment of truth, right? Where have you had that? Like, have you had that in your life? You know, there's course corrections in life, and that's where you find that feather on your face, and you realize something's going on, and you make the shift, and then there's force corrections that hit you like a ton of bricks, which was that moment for me. All right, so here's the thing. She was saying I was extraordinary in areas where it's pretty difficult to be extraordinary for a lot of people. And within those areas, there was a success formula that was hidden to me. And I took the introspection assessment from Lifebook. So if you go to mylifebook.com, there's an assessment on 12 categories of life. What I found is that I was extraordinary in 10 categories, and I was ordinary in two. One was my health, and the other one was my relationship with my wife. And so rather than argue or fight, I got immediately emotional, and I decided to do something about it. And what I found was, in these other areas, there were things that I was doing on a regular basis to create success in my life that I wasn't doing in my life and in my marriage. So the first thing is I wasn't doing a weekly meeting with my wife where there's no kids around, no interruptions, no phone calls. But it was her and I sitting down and. And talking about what was going on in our life. You know, when you create a great future, like a bigger future like Dan would talk about, that's what really makes a marriage extraordinary. But a lot of people, when they get derailed and frustrated, they say it's a money problem. But the money problem gets them shortsighted. It gets them off track. They're not thinking about this future that could be great. They're thinking about getting through something that's difficult, and life becomes about that conversation. And I think extraordinary relationships come from the conversations we have. So why not set aside the time uninterrupted every single week with the person or the people you love, and you go through and you have this conversation. Now, the first conversations went a lot like this. Couple good minutes, a couple bad minutes. Like, you know, hey, you're gone too much. This is going on. And then I started thinking, well, what else do I do? Yeah, I have these meetings, but I also have people that I look up to in other areas of My life. When I was doing radio, I was going, who do I look up to? And I was learning from them. So I went out and I said, here are the people that I think have the best marriages in the world. John and Missy Butcher. Patrick and Laurie Giantempo. David and Nicole Jackson. I got Sean Stephenson. We flew out to Chicago, and I declared my commitment to my wife in front of them. We had a little ceremony, and I asked these guys, will you support us? See, this is a key distinction in life. We have people that are gonna be our friends. We have people that we need to be only friendly with. And what I decided to do was anyone who didn't have an extraordinary relationship for six months, I wasn't spending any time with them. I'd be friendly, but I would decline any invitation. And I'd only accept invitations from people who had great relationships. And I started to invite those people into my life. And that's why I started this off in Chicago, which, by the way, we had a second honeymoon out there that was off the charts because we got to stay in John and Missy's apartment. And they set up this great thing. Nice to be with rich friends that have good relationships. You know what I'm saying? There's some perks to that. Which, by the way, first call I ever had with Joe, he introduced me to John and Misty. So I thought that was pretty extraordinary. The second thing is I had to go through an exercise that I called the Do Over. Guys, look back in your life, you've probably said or done something totally stupid. Here's the one that guys do all the time. I don't know if women do this, but they say, I'm doing this for you. I'm doing this to put food on the table. That is a bunch of shit. You're not doing this just to put food on the table. In this world today, with the capacity in this room, we can put food on the table in our. It is easy. We do it because we love it. But we miss out on other things we love. Because you're gonna hear from Robert Hirsch in a little while, talk about making it count. And we have the wrong metrics of what matters in life. And see, in my 20s, I didn't redefine what successful was. It was having a whole bunch of money because I came from a coal mining town. And so it was work, work, work. And when people said, what are your hobbies? I'm like, I work. Thanks for saving me from that, Babs. I appreciate that. So I had to do a do over where I went to my wife and I said, remember that time I said this? And she'd say, uh huh. I say, I don't know who said that, but that was absolutely the stupidest thing I've ever heard come from someone's mouth. I hope that you can forgive me. And it literally melted the walls. The next thing is when I invest in things, they tend to grow. So I started to invest in things. I invested in Dino Watt, who happens to be here. He had a program called Business and Marriage, which took me about a year to convince my wife to go to, because it wasn't like counseling or anything, but it was like, hey, you have systems of success in your life, why not set them up in your business? So we hired Dino, we started spending time with him and we had some major breakthroughs because he didn't care that I was his number one referrer. He still held me accountable in every single one of those meetings. So I started doing that. Spend time with the right people, choose who I'm going to be friendly with instead of friends with, invite the friends into my life, look for people that I can learn from and get best practices from them. So one of the best practices was date night. So I have a date night every single week with my wife. And here's the thing, it's not some, like dinner and movies thing. I have like a list of great ideas so that when it comes time for date night, it's part of a system that we're having an extraordinary date night because we might go to our date night pad that I got downtown, that we go cook and go do something there. We might go to a concert. We might go up to the Montage at Park City, one of our favorite places, which is. That's what we did last week. Hot air balloon ride. Which got canceled because I was scared as hell. So I was kind of glad. But, you know, I'm trying to be romantic and shit, but so the weekly meeting is critical. And you know what? I've created an agenda and I'm gonna share that agenda with all of you. The other two things I'm gonna share with you is an interview that John Butcher did with me after I went through this transformation. Okay? And what's great about the interview, you're not hearing it from my perspective. You're hearing my wife talk about it. And I tried to convince her early on when this was difficult. Why don't we put each other first? I know we have kids, I know we have other priorities, but let's just put each other first. And she's like, well, I can't. I got this with the kids and I got that with the kids. And our life was becoming just wrapped up in our kids. But I said, try it on for a month. And I'm telling you, it changed everything because now I'm an example to my kids what it means to be a man, what it means to be a husband, what it means to be a romantic. And they can see that example. They can see that we have time for each other and it's not every little whim that they have. And then I had to convince my wife to invest in herself and have a nanny without feeling guilty so that she could take care of herself and go after purpose other than just being a mom, right? And that brought a whole other world together for us. So here's. You know, I normally don't look at notes, but this isn't my normal talk. This is like my life I'm sharing here with you guys. You guys can go to freedomfasttrack.com marriage. There's no opt in. But it's also an interview I did with Dino with my wife, an interview I did with John with my wife. And then we also shared kind of our, you know, our agenda that we use. Don't go through the whole damn agenda every week. Don't let it become an excuse. Just go through the parts that make sense. Brian, is this helpful? When you started doing this? I know a lot of people have started to do this. So we also created some rules and structure. We have something called 1446, 14 nights internationally away from the kids, four nights. If I'm gone more than four nights in any month, I'm taking days off during the week and I'm never home later than 6pm and no technology once I get home. Right? Completely changed how we operate, how we connect, I'm telling you. And it's hard in a marriage sometimes because, you know, in business you make a mistake and you get over it. And in marriage it's like that shit can come back to haunt you for a while, right? Or they'll remind you when you're in another fight or something like that. So it's nice to have got through this. But I'm gonna end with, this is the key. This is the secret. And we've heard it from so many speakers up here talking over and over again. You gotta have vision in your business. You gotta have a mission in your business. You gotta be clear about what you, you know, the Rockefeller habits. You talk about JFK saying we're gonna send a man to the moon and return him safely home within this decade. Clear cut. Not something that lives nebulously in the mind, but something that lives in the heart. Have you done that for your marriage? Do you have that vision? Have you articulated that in your marriage or your key relationships? Because I have. I'm an extraordinary husband and a premier romantic. Now, I haven't rode in on a horse with my shirt off, but about anything else for my wife, I've pretty much done. And I love to baby her and I love to take her out on date night and she can have input about date night. But I'll tell you what, I want to take care of her that way and make those choices. On Mondays, though, when we do our weekly meeting, that's where we handle the finances, that's where we handle the travel. So guess what? The rest of the week is freed up for us to talk about vision, what we're excited about, positive focus, and what makes life great. So thank you. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to talk about three things that I've learned through studying billionaires that we implement with our clients that you can implement yourself. And these are the three things that billionaires really nail when it comes to their wealth planning. Let's get through the disclosures that just says, don't believe a word I'm about to tell you and let's get into it. So the first of the three things that billionaires do very well, I'm going to just draw a continuum right here. And on the left of this continuum, I'm going to put distraction. And on the right of this continuum, I'm going to put focus. By the way, I was supposed to be a doctor, so excuse my handwriting. So on the left on distraction, I see many entrepreneurs and what they have when it comes to their wealth building is what I call random wishes. And random wishes doesn't get it done. A little more toward the focus I see goals. So there's some goal setting a little more focused I would call success. But if I had to tell you about those three areas, random wishes, goals, and success, I would put those in the red because there are plenty of entrepreneurs like you that have random wishes, goals or success. But really, to get sustained wealth, you need another level over here. And this other level is a compelling focus. And if you have compelling focus and believe in the billionaires have compelling focus, that's when you get something that we call sustained. Well, so what are your first steps on this for each One of these, I'm going to tell you what the concept is, and then I'm going to give you an action step. So I'll just kind of star the action steps. So the first action step for a compelling focus is something that Keith Cunningham calls thinking time. And thinking time is for you to sit down in a quiet place and first ask yourself, why do you want to be wealthy? Why do you want to be seriously rich? It's really important to get clear on your why. Also ask yourself, what what would you do if you got seriously wealthy? How would you use that money? And then the second part of this I'll put another star is ties into Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan's book who, not how. I'll give you a quick story on something that happened to me during COVID So when Covid happened, they shut down all the gyms. Mimi and I are really into working out. We couldn't go to the gym, and it was making me crazy. Well, I have a friend who's a personal trainer who said, jim, I can get you in a private gym. No one is in there, but you have to pay me as a personal trainer. I remember thinking, I don't need a personal trainer. I've been working out for 30 years. I know my way around a gym. But I had no choice. So I hired them two weeks later. I was surprised to realize that I had the best two weeks of workouts I'd have in over a decade. And guess what? Now I have a personal trainer. And what I realized is the personal trainer gave me a compelling focus. I wasn't on my earbuds listening to one of Paul Culligan's podcasts. Sorry, Paul, I wasn't talking to my friends in the gym. I was focused during that workout time of just intensely getting it done. So you can hire a good wealth manager to give you a compelling focus. And that's the whole. So those are your steps on compelling focus. The second area that billionaires do a really good job. I'll just draw this diagram. Here is something that I like to call wealth discovered. Most of you are making enough money already to get seriously rich. The problem is you're leaking money and you don't know where you're leaking money. And in my experience, 26 years of working with entrepreneurs, the number who know where their money's going and they're not leaking money is very small compared to, like this red. Better compared to the entrepreneurs who don't know where their money is going. In my book, I talk about Mark, which is not his real name. Who's an entrepreneur who gets introduced as selling his company for more than $80 million, which is a true statement. By the time Mark sat down with me, he only had $5 million left. You go, how in the heck does he do that? Or did he do that? Well, first of all, he had taken on investors, so he only owned a little more than half of the company when it sold. But, you know, $40 million is still a lot of money. He had done no planning, no exit planning, no tax planning, no asset protection planning. So he ended up paying too much in taxes, and then he put money in a bunch of silly investments with friends and with other people and lost a lot of that. The reason I tell you that is you don't want to end up like the entrepreneur that says, I can't believe how much I made in the last 10 years and how little I have to show for it today. And in my experience, that's about 4% that actually don't have that, that are actually not leaking money. And that's one out of 25. So in this area, what's the problem? Well, one is missed opportunities. The other one is being comfortable. Believe it or not, being comfortable is a big problem for wealth discovered. So what do you need to do about wealth discovered? You need to sit down and think about where is your money going as far as taxes, one of the biggest costs for successful entrepreneurs. What about insurance premiums? What about legal fees? What about investment fees? And what about expenses, both business and personal? You need to really be aware of those things if you're going to find out where you're leaking money and then have a good strategy so that you can start building wealth. Let's talk about the third thing, which I'm gonna watch how fancy I am here. I'm gonna add a page as we speak. Add page. Look at that. That's for people that say, I'm not good at technology. Mimi. So let's talk about the third thing that billionaires do really well. And I'm going to just draw this diagram here. So this is infrastructure. And infrastructure is really the people and the process for how you make financial decisions. The billionaires do a great job with infrastructure. So as I said before, most entrepreneurs, and I'm talking successful entrepreneurs like this, they have kind of a red zone as far as infrastructure is concerned. But the ones who end up in the green, this is only about 2% in my experience. So what is good infrastructure? Well, one thing that is not good infrastructure is down at the bottom here is entrepreneurs that are unconsciously unaware. This is the ostrich. And this happens to most entrepreneurs at some point is you're so busy building your business and taking care of your family, you're unconsciously unaware of the people in the process. That is your infrastructure. And then another enemy is you have enough of an infrastructure, so you're executing, but you're really not at the level you need to do because the highest level of infrastructure gives you absolute confidence. So when it comes to infrastructure, here's the exercise I want you to do. I want you list your professionals. In tax, legal, insurance, and investment. And then I want you to give them a grade, not five Ds. I'd say one to 10. 10 is amazing. Great personality. Proactively bringing you ideas works well in a team. All those things would be a 10. A 1 would be, you should have fired that person a long time ago. And a five you might be, I'm not quite sure how good this person is. But rate your professionals when it comes to your infrastructure. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below, below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. Infrastructure is so important. I just want to take a minute and show you something that we created for clients. The entrepreneurs virtual family office. And this really we took from billionaire families and have honed it over the last 15 years. But I want you to think about your own situation and how you can better create an infrastructure of the people in the process and by looking at this model. So we believe, Mimi and I believe that entrepreneurs are the reason for most great things in this country, the reason for jobs in the economy, the reason for innovations, the reason even for a lot of the giving that goes on. And every entrepreneur I've met in 26 years, they all have wishes and dreams, but very few of them do something that we have coined. Make rich real. And make rich real can mean different things to different entrepreneurs. So to you, it might mean having a certain amount of passive income every month. It might mean having a certain home in a certain area. It might mean having a private jet. It might mean time off, three months off a year to travel the world. It could be causes you care about or people you love that you want to take care of. Mimi was an immigrant Is an immigrant to America. Her family came over when she was five years old. And when she was young, it was very hard. They were on food stamps. It was a big challenge. And a few years ago, I asked Mimi, I said, is rich real to you? And she said, it is. I said, how do you know? She said, because when I go to the grocery store, I don't look at any prices. I can buy whatever I want. So what makes rich real for you could be different. But you really need to be in tune with what that is for you. And then to get there, you have to have these three outcomes. You have to have absolute confidence in your team of professionals. You have to maximize your wealth. I'll make that bigger inside and outside your business. And then you have to have a plan for sustained wealth. Because building businesses and making money is a different skill set than managing money. Then to get there, there's three main areas. First is protect moving from vulnerable to secure. Then manage moving from uncoordinated to worry free. And then finally grow moving from incremental to exponential growth. Within each of these, we created three catalysts. So these are the nine areas that billionaires really nail. And you need to also so under protect asset protection. This is having a plan so your assets can't be taken by a lawsuit. From the basic liability coverages, personal and business, all the way up to entity and trust design wealth transfer. So making sure if you have kids, they're not ruined by money, that they only have opportunities. And then if whether you have kids or not, make sure you have the right corporate documents in place so that if you get sick or injured, the right people step in. So when you're bettered, you're better, you don't lose your business. And so that if your partner or your business associate gets sick or injured, you don't end up business partners with that person's spouse or brother or parent. Okay. And then finally, the time energy shield. So this is having someone in your life that protects your time and your energy from things like pitches, projects, and other professionals. Under manage. The first is the wealth wheel. So this is having your wheel of advisors. We just talked about this. All a players. They're collaborating and communicating on your behalf, but you're not in the middle managing those. You need someone in the middle who can speak the languages of tax, legal, insurance and investment that can manage that for you. Linchpin partner. This is who holds it all together. This is someone typically in wealth management who has three distinct qualities. First, experience in building these type of structures because you don't want to have someone learn on your dime and your time. Second, someone who specializes in working with entrepreneurs because you have a different set of problems and opportunities than other types of investors and other types of individuals. And then finally, someone who takes a fiduciary standard of care, always represents you from a legal standard, doesn't sell products, doesn't have investment minimums, doesn't take referral fees, kickbacks or revenue sharing. And then finally, business value. So your largest asset, if you haven't exited, is your business, making sure that you plan far in advance for that sex exit to get the best outcome possible for you. And when you think about business value and exit, you will exit your business, I guarantee it. Every entrepreneur exits either because you sell to a strategic or financial buyer, you get sick or injured, you die, you give it to your kids, you sell it to your employees, you get beat up by competition. Under grow. The first is tax planning. So having a well thought out, annually updated and implemented tax plan investments, so building wealth outside of your company and things like real estate, stocks and bonds and private equity. And then finally profit amplification, which is identifying the critical drivers that drive cash flow in your company. So you can easily monitor and improve those critical drivers. So those make up the virtual family office, but also are the areas that you need to build infrastructure for yourself. So I'm going to end with this and then we'll open up for questions. You are in your current financial position and no matter what I know in a period of time you're going to have your future financial position. And let's say that's five years from now. So no matter what, from today to five years from now, you're going to be in a different financial situation. And what I've seen with entrepreneurs is if you don't pay attention to this stuff, what happens is you naturally drift. And when you drift, you can end up in instability, or worse yet, if you even drift farther, which I hope this wouldn't happen to you. But if you drift even farther, you can end up in crisis. Nobody wants that. On the other hand, if you really focus on this, you can, oops, let me redo your financial future five years out and let's go to here. Okay, so what you can do though is you can move up the curve and this takes, you have to decide and you have to act. And if you do that, you can get to a place called security. But there's a higher level and that is getting to where I say you make rich real now in that Journey. Guess when you're closest to those higher lines. Today. Today you're closest. And the longer you wait, the farther that distance is to jump. Because the whole idea is you want to jump the lines and you want to ride the curve. Once you get on the right path, it will happen for you. If you wait in the future, it's going to be riskier, it's going to be costlier, and it's going to be more stressful. So now's the time to jump the lines. Now there's a way you can jump quicker and that is if you get some sort of assessment. We call this a family office assessment. But if you get an assessment and you know where you are in all those nine areas, you can much more quickly jump the curves and get to here to make rich real. So an assessment really is having some experts dive deep in all areas of tax, legal, insurance and investment to find out where you are and then put together a game plan, as I said earlier, to give you a compelling focus so that you can get there. I don't want to make you dizzy, but I'm just going to go through the three main points again. The first is compelling focus. And remember, set aside thinking time, why you want to be seriously wealthy, what you're going to do with the money and the who if you need to hire someone. Second, make sure you look at wealth discovered. Where is your money leaking? And that's how you're going to max your wealth. So sit down and look at your taxes, your insurance premiums, your legal fees, your investment fees, your expenses, personal and business. Find out where the money's leaking and redirect that to something more positive. And then finally, your people in your process, the infrastructure and list out all your professionals in the areas of tax, legal, insurance and investment and grade them 1 to 10 to give you a starting point. So with that, I'm going to just say this, that you can start managing your wealth like a billionaire, even if you're not one yet. So you described integrity as a master virtue. Right up there, the most important virtue, love. So what is integrity? Why is it so important? And what are your thoughts, perspectives and insights on love? Okay, well, we'll start with love. Yeah, I think love is, well, I could argue love is the meaning of life. I mean, meaning of life is love. And you won't be really be happy if you don't have love in your life. But love in an organization is extremely important. And yet in most corporations, love's in the closet. It's in the corporate Closet. It's hidden away. You think about why is that? Well, because people think love is weak. Yeah, love's nice. But think about the metaphors that are used in business. There are three major types of metaphors. Now, getting some technology metaphors, that makes four. But the longest metaphors have been war metaphors. Right. We're going to kill those guys, you know, let's roll. They're dead meat. Or they're sports metaphors. Right. It's about quarterback in the game and getting the game plan and hitting home runs. And so we use sports metaphors. And sports metaphors. There's winners and there's losers. Somebody wins, everybody else loses. And then you've got Darwinian or biological metaphors. Survival of the fittest. Only the paranoid survive. Is a jungle out there. Well, our metaphors define how we structure reality, how we think about it. And those metaphors do not leave much of a place for love. Love is too. Yeah, that's good. When we have peace, someday we can have love, but we don't have peace. And so we're going to go out and fight the good fight. So. And that really, organizations will not reach their highest and fullest potential until they can unleash love in the culture. And then with that. Because when people feel love, when they feel safe, when they feel comfortable, they can be most creative then. So I really think that helps feed innovation. It certainly feeds loyalty and connection. So I'm a. What can I say? I'm a champion of love. I believe in. And love is incredibly important in life, and it's very important in business. And it's underappreciated integrity. Integrity is much more than just being honest. Integrity is about trustworthiness. It's about having ethical courage to do the right thing, even though it might cost you something doing it. In my experience in life, I'm not saying integrity is extremely rare, but it's not common. I've met very few people that I think have very much integrity. People just routinely lie, for one thing. Now think about our political system. Tell me the truth. Has there ever been a president in your lifetime that wasn't kind of like a good liar? I mean, it doesn't matter what party they're from. They're just liars. They just lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. And what people want, they want leaders to have integrity. They want them to be authentic. They want them to show up as they really are. But I don't know if you could get elected anything if you showed up that way. So I think integrity is very important. It's very important in business because if you're dealing with somebody with integrity, you know you can trust them. You know they're going to do the right thing. You don't have to be watching your back. And I think that. I know that I strive to. To be a man of integrity, a person of integrity. And that's the kind of people I want to work with in Whole Foods as well. You have 85,000, give or take, team members. When I go to Whole Foods, for the most part, very intensive, great culture. People seem to really enjoy being there compared to any other type of grocery store that I experience. How do you instill that into the organization, especially when it's so large? Well, I mean, there's a lot of love in Whole Foods. That's a big part of it. We've unleashed it. But I mean, culture is very important. Culture is underrated. And people, particularly entrepreneurs, are so busy. Entrepreneurs are busy people. We're out driving. We're pushing things along. We take culture for granted. But what I found is that if you have a good culture, then it self replicates itself. It attracts the right people to the organization. It teaches people, enculturates them. It acts as an immune system to keep the wrong people out. So culture is very important. It starts with values. What are your core values? What's your higher purpose? What are you trying to do in the world that inspires people? Most people don't want to work for a company. If the first day somebody comes on to work and you say, okay, so welcome to Whole Foods Market. While you're here, your main job is to get shareholder value up. We got our stock price, we got to get it up. Your job is to get up to 50 bucks. That's your job. I'm afraid that's not going to inspire very many people. That may work on Wall street, but it doesn't work in Main Street America. People want to have purpose. They want to have values. They want to be part of a tribe, a culture, a family that cares about them, that genuinely cares about them and that they care about as well. People want to bring their whole selves to the workplace, and they usually don't. Right? They compartmentalize. They bring part of who they are, but their whole authentic self doesn't show up. And so they're playing a role. They're pretending. And so the level of dissatisfaction in most corporations is like, you know, 70% of the people are not engaged. They don't care. Whole Foods Market's not solved all the problems there, but we tackled them and we've made more progress than many other companies have to create a place where people have a sense of purpose, have a sense of belonging, feel loved, feel cared for, and that they know the company will try to do the right thing by them. Awesome. A guest like you for a show like this, we put out promotional materials to tell people, come to listen, and here is just a taste of what you're going to get. And we use these things we call fascinations and teasers that are going to bring people in. Now, this is the one I've been waiting to ask you for. Yes. How can someone become a better leader, a better influencer, and a better lover? I know this is the one everybody came here for. So we've been salting the communication, we've been getting to this point, and now the big, the payoff. Well, here's the secret that I believe, and I've been yet to be convinced that I'm wrong. You have to start backwards. Okay? Start first to be a better lover in your home. Be a better communicator with your loved one, whoever your partner is, your spouse, your kids. But let's just go with spouse or a partner if you can. So I believe you have only so much bandwidth in your brain. And I'm just going to go off of my experience. This is just what I felt. And how I came up with this idea was obviously I came from not just one divorce, but both of my parents have been divorced twice. And so I've seen that. Right. And so when I got into the. You asked earlier, like, kind of, what was that pivot moment? The real pivot moment for me was when I decided to get married to my wife and we both sat down and I've known her since I was five. So we've. We've literally known each other whole lives. She saw what my parents went through and what I went through. But we sat down and said, how are we not going to do that? Right. Like, my parents taught me a lot of things not to do, which I'm so grateful for. Right. It was very traumatic as a kid, but I joke with my parents at this point all the time. I've made a ton of money off of your divorce, so thank you. Like a good thing. But I. So we sat down and we said, what are the systems, literally systems and processes we're going to put into our relationship so that doesn't happen? What are our core values that go beyond, I'll be honest with you, you know, or, you know, we love each other so we started creating those. Well, as a entrepreneur, you've got a lot of stuff going on in your head. You only have bandwidth for so much. We talked about frustration, overwhelm. Well, that's where it comes from. If I'm not happy in my relationship, it is the underlining factor. Everything else I do. If I had a fight with my wife in the morning and I'm sorry, well, you guys talk about this enough in Genius Network, this is a big shock. But excuse my for everybody, if I haven't had sex with my wife in over a week and we just had an argument, I go to the office and the underlying things going on in my brain that's taking up bandwidth. Even if I say, well, my office is my escape place or this is where I keep my focus, it's there. It underlines everything I do. If I'm not happy with my wife and I go to work, something small is going to piss me off with my team members. Something small is going to annoy me with a client. And so if I'm not happy there, then it affects everything else. So the opposite has to be true as well. So if I'm happy in my relationship, if I'm focused on creating a better relationship between my wife and my kids, then I'm going to not have to. That frees up so much more bandwidth to be creative, to be focused, to be in flow, to be attentive, to be present. And so if I can master that, then I can go and master this over here. And so I would start with lover. So focus on lover again. I'll go back to that saying there's nothing will no success outside the home will compensate for failure in it. My first and most important relationship is that with my spouse. Even my kids know this. Since my kids were little, I would sit them down and say, I love you, I would die for you, I'd do anything for you. But your mom is number one. You will never divide us. Because like now I'm an empty nester and it's just the two of us. So I needed to make sure that that was good for the rest of my life. Yeah, right. Like I go to the end with her, not you. Like you're going to find somebody else abandoned me. So that is the first piece. Then when it comes to all the other things, it makes it so much easier if you live in that space. I can in integrity walk into one of these offices and say, I am here to help you have a better relationship with yourself first then your team members and then Your patients. Well, yourself includes your spouse or your loved one or your partner. And so I can walk in integrity and say that. And they take me seriously. I talk freely about how much I enjoy and love my wife. I talk about also where I'm an idiot in my relationship, but I'm working on it. Like, we used to start off. We used to have marriage seminars that we would do that were based on. They were for hiring entrepreneurs. And I would start off every single one. I'd stand up on stage and I'd say, how many of you guys want to hear about the fight Shannon and I had last night? Or how many guys want to hear about our most recent argument? And the reason is because we're like normal people. We argue, but we understand the power of that. So if I can focus on lover, then I can focus on relationship when it comes to my influence. And then leadership, it's just a backwards scenario. That's fascinating. That's good. And then you mentioned then taking that and kind of now shifting it outward to your relationship with your. With your clients, with your. Yeah. So, yeah. What's some. As a leader, I. So one of the core values I have, my relationship is radical transparency. Okay. We don't have honesty. We have radical transparency. And my business ownership, I say the same thing with my business owner. So the first thing you have to be is be a hundred percent authentic with who you are, authentic with your team members, and love them enough to say no or to say goodbye. So what I mean by that is there's a lot of people that hold on to people in their businesses, as employers, as employees, because they feel bad because they. They. You know, deep down, that person's a good person. Oh, yeah. They've been here so long. Yeah. However, they're not being honest and they're not being in integrity with that person. This is the test. I always say I do this from this stage. I say, doctors, if you walk in in the morning and you see Sally, and Sally walks by you and you say, good morning, Sally, and she says, good morning, doctor. And you think in your head, man, I wish you would quit. That is your cue that you're out of integrity and you need to let her go. It's not that she's doing anything wrong. Maybe Sally does want to come to work 10 minutes late. Maybe Sally does like the drama. Maybe Sally is somebody who is insubordinate. That doesn't make Sally wrong. And that's what we do as leaders, is we tend to make them wrong. But true leadership is saying huh. You know what? They're not wrong for wanting those things. I want to help them not want those things, but they're not wrong. They're just not the right fit for our business or we're not the right fit for them. So we love them into another job and love them enough to say goodbye. That starts. That's where all leadership starts, is that authenticity of that. And then you can build upon empathy. You can build upon having a good vision and culture for your business. But if you can't be authentic and real and create that safe environment, then it's never going to be, never going to work out the way you want. Let's talk about kind of the mindsets and emotions, how you get, how you kind of manage that among yourself or what kind of do you come into this with on a daily basis? I guess, you know, are you an affirmation guy? Are you? Yeah, I guess I'm an enneagram 3. Most people think I'm an enneagram 7, but I am still driven by success. Affirmations. Yeah. We actually did the love language test with everyone on our staff, which is good. We say, love your customers more than you love your product, but love your people, love your team even more than you love your customers. If that's true, do you know what your people love? We didn't know it. So our fans first director said, I want to do a love language test of all of our people. And so we did a test of the entire team and it was great. We found out that 90% of our people were words of affirmation was number four. Number one. And it was funny. Our president was words of affirmation was number one. But touch was on the bottom. He goes, guys, tell me you love me, but don't you ever touch me. Yeah, don't you ever touch me. But yeah, so we learned that. And again, I remember, we ask our team every year what was their favorite moment of their year. And I will never forget our director of operations. And we hosted huge concerts here, sold out crowds. And he goes, jesse, it was after our first concert and you put your arm on my shoulder and said that you were proud of me and that I did well tonight. He goes, that was my best moment. And I go, wow. And I was like, it was just something I never really remembered. But, you know, we think as leaders, how do we tell people, you know, that we care about, recognize them? Isn't that interesting how when knowing that little bit of information, like if that person was words of affirmation and touch you just like full HD appreciated them and what you could do that same thing if people are gifts and quality time or. Yeah, you know, looking at that, I see how that would, how that would work. And you have a database, you know, when you. We have all of our fans, we have all of our team. When they join our team, even in the interview process, we ask all these questions so we get to know them. When they first show up that first day, we try to create the biggest fan of them. So we map their entire day. When they first come in, we actually have everyone in costume, Silly string. We have their favorite breakfast, we have a whole breakfast ceremony. We map their day. At the end of the day, we have a big cheers. Their name goes up on the wall. And so again, I think if you want to create great fans of your customers, you got to create great fans of your people first. And that's part of our strategy, how we do things. But I don't know if that was the whole question. I think you asked some affirmations. I'm an energy guy. I just try to thrive. I try to do things that give me energy. I was terrible at operations, I'm terrible at finances. I'm terrible. I don't touch those things details. I stay in my energy. So I created my energy list. What are the things that give me energy? And I realized it was creating, sharing and growing. Whenever I'm coming with ideas, creating new visions, sharing with our team, leading on a speech on a podcast or growing, reading, learning, listening to your podcast, other podcasts. I try to spend most of my day doing that and hire other people to do everything else. So when I go home to my child. Yeah, yeah. And I go home to my 23 year olds, you know, I have, I have energy. I have energy to be there for them because I'm doing the things I gave them. Because everything you're doing all day is energy. So if all you're thinking we're a lot alike in that in my world, I'm. The ideas are what. That's the thing is I really like the coming up with what, what we could do, possibilities, getting all of those things. But I definitely need and am surrounded by who's. Who can then make all of that come true because I'm not the person who can focus enough to do any of it right. That's the reality. So what's your best piece of advice for, for say a startup or somebody who's thinking, you know what, I'm gonna take something on here and I wanna take this approach it's not the most poetic, but I would ask this question and I'd put it right on top of the front page of your paper and look at it on a regular basis. What makes you different? And what we did is we actually challenged our team and it's on our website, on our. About us. We wrote all the different things that we're different. You know, the only, all inclusive ballpark. We have no ads at our ballpark. We have, you know, grandma coaches, eight year old coaches, we play in kilts. You know, we wrote all those things. And I think everyone tries to be a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper. What can you be the only at? And when you're the only, you don't have to market, you don't have to do everything else. You're the only because everyone's doing the marketing for you. So what makes you different? What can you be the only? I think for a startup, if you're trying to be a Me too, it's hard work. It's a bloody ocean as the blue ocean strategy, right? Exactly. So, all right, this whole concept of love right now, love versus lust, how would you define. We'll start with you, Andy. True love. How does one create true love? What is it? How does one create it, cultivate it? I think of love as choosing. It's the process of choosing one dedicated human to be a sacred mirror, to reflect back your magnificence and your madness, your magnificence, your intelligence, your poetry, your wisdom, your potential and your madness. All your insecurities, your fears, defense mechanisms, your shadow. I mean, nowhere but in your romantic relationship does all your crazy shit come out. And so they're there to reflect both of those and to stand fiercely for your greatness. And I think of love as also a crucible for personal growth. Being in a loving relationship is literally the most transformational workshop going on the planet that I've ever found. So, yeah, it's a crucible. It's also a trampoline and a sanctuary. It's a trampoline for your goals and your dreams and your dharma and your purpose. And a sanctuary or a refuge for your heart, for your failures, for insecurities, for your fears. You need both equal trampoline and sanctuary. And you know, some sims was talking earlier about Michelangelo and David, and it's my favorite metaphor for true love because Michelangelo is known for seeing the block of marble in the quarry. And he said he saw David inside the marble. And what he did is he just sculpted away everything that Wasn't David. Right. So he saw the magnum opus in there. And when you fall in love with someone, they see a vision of who you could become. Your highest, greatest self. And what they're doing when they're asking you to change, criticizing with bad bedside manner. What they're actually doing is they're saying, inside of you, I see a masterpiece. And I'm here to just scrape away everything that's not you. Your partner's not trying to change you. They're literally trying to scrape off all your defense mechanisms, your insecurities, your affairs, your coping technologies to get approval, everything that's not you, they're actually trying to emancipate you from your unconsciousness, from your smallness into a masterpiece. And so I want you to start seeing your partner's complaints as an attempt to sculpt you into greatness. Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, that's pretty good. How about you? I learned about love through Cinderella and Snow White. And let me tell you, I was very disappointed when I grew up. And heartbreak after heartbreak, I thought, what's wrong with me? And I realized one important lesson, that love doesn't automatically equate partnership. And the love that I thought was love was really lust, intensity, a little bit of love addiction and codependency. And I think that when I work with people who have a lot of problems in relationships, it's this unrealistic idea of what love is, that there's a perfection, that you're going to lock eyes with someone and you're just going to know that they're soulmate. And when you're chasing this fantasy, you're not reality based. And what love is and what partnership is, it's we oriented versus self oriented. And I don't think everyone is available or ready for that type of partnership. And if you're not, that's totally fine. But you also have to be super honest with what you're able and capable and available for. And if you're not, just enjoy that phase of your life I want to add to yours. It's we oriented. My understanding of true love is you need to have equal parts integration and differentiation. The relationship's an organism. It's alive and it breathes in and it breathes out. And when it breathes in, we're together, we're connected, we're communal, and we breathe out. We're separate, autonomous, sovereign individuals. And most couples have one that's really good at selfing and one that's really good at othering. And you need both. So I think True love is about identifying as the us and the we. But also, if you're an empath and you're always up in the we, your job is to become more I, more self, more autonomous. And you fall in love with your favorite teacher. You fall in love with the person who emancipate you from your naivete of being all selfing or all othering and cross trains you into your other underdeveloped skill. So selfing and othering. Elaborate on that a bit. So selfing. When someone is doing, I know what I want, what I need, what I think, what I feel. Every relationship that I've seen that's successful has these two sacred polarities. One that's good at ihood, mehood, and one that's good at we and us. And they find each other because they need to develop that underdeveloped skill. They need to cross train. You fall in love with your unconscious mind. Sean Stevenson used to say, you fall in love with that which you're not yet good at. And. And you hire them. You literally hire. The most important job you'll ever hire for is your partner. Partner. And you hire them to emancipate you from your night from where you're not good at either selfing or othering because they're really good at it. But then when they. About how you're not selfing enough. I'm married to the best selfer I know, Evan Pagan. And I literally was like, why are you so selfish? And he's like, why are you so obsessed with other people's needs? And so I had to learn how to self and become an apprentice to my partner's genius. And he had to become an apprentice to my genius, which is tuning into the system and the needs of the relationship. And so I think every successful relationship needs both of those polarities and they need to cross train. Yeah, you're smarter than Evan anyway. He's kind of a dumbass. He says that. I know. Yeah, it's awesome. Okay. You know, one thing I want to comment on. So the self esteem. I had become really good friends with the late Nathaniel Brandon, who was, you know, one of the kind of like the godfather of self esteem. And he wrote the Six Pillars of Self Esteem, the Art of Living Consciously, one of his greatest books, which was not one of his bestsellers. And this is where I want to kind of tie in self esteem. And the other topic was taking responsibility. I think a lot of people just don't take responsibility, don't want to take responsibility, don't even know what responsibility means. And I often think about my upbringing. You know, I spent many years just in therapy and in recovery and it happened. I've been in recovery for over 20 years and now I spend about half my time helping people that struggle with addiction. And so I have genius recovery foundation. Even the proceeds of my book, what's in it for Them goes to, to addiction recovery. And for, and part of this is my childhood. I was constantly criticized as a child and I was physically abused and sexually abused and I became a drug addict. And it later in life I actually learned, you know, I've heard the words, you know, responding with ability, which is responsibility, you know, and many, many times it wasn't until it clicked in my head that when my life was working, I was responding. When my life was not and is not working, I'm reacting. And so people react to life and then other people respond to life. And of course I think, you know, you respond with ability. And so the more that you become able to do something, you can learn the technical skills of something, but the ability to manage your mind or at least get into a flow state. Because what addiction is is an unmanageable mind which leads to an unmanageable life in unmanageable physiology. Because it's not just mental, it's physical. And I've thought about this a lot. So you, with teaching, leadership and with everything you've written about, there's always been this through line, this vein of be responsible, you know, take in confidence. Feels good to operate with confidence, but courage doesn't feel good. So when you have to muster courage, the more that you can tap into the belief in yourself in that you can do it, or at least you're going to try. You oftentimes, even in the face of massive adversity, you can at least step up to the plate. You might not always win, you might get knocked out, but the fact is it's just stepping into that. So I'd love to ask you, you know what, how you think the link between self esteem and responsibility creates a functioning human. Well, this has been one of the most important things in my life. What you just talked about, self responsibility. I began studying this. I spent thousands of hours, by the way, going back four or five decades. What I found just sort of like tripped over it is that the most important thing in life is to be happy. It goes back to Aristotle in 350 BC is that he said that everything that a person does in life is to achieve their own happiness. The difference is how effective are they at being happy. And the obstacle to happiness is negativity, negative thinking, destructive criticism. And so. But the key to the causative factor of negativity is blaming. Blaming is the worst thing that happens, is you blame someone else for something in your life with which you're not happy. So what you have to do in order to be a happy, fulfilled person is you have to stop blaming. And the wonderful thing about the magic words, I call them, I am responsible for the magic thing about those words, is that when you say those words, you cancel all blaming. Blaming stops. You cannot blame someone and be positive. And when you accept responsibility, you automatically become negative. So in my seminars, I teach a whole lot of things. One of them is I call the golden triangle. And the golden triangle has three points to it. The first point is the acceptance of complete responsibility for your life and for everything that happens to you. That's number one. That's the starting point. And so I teach my audiences to say aloud, I am responsible. I am responsible. And as I said, I've written 91 books and I have a schedule for nine more. I want to get to 100. And I have my audiences say, I am responsible. And what happens as soon as you say, I am responsible, all negativity stops and you say, I am responsible. I am responsible. I'm responsible. Now my. I have several top selling books, millions of copies. My second or third best selling book is called no Excuses, the Power of Self Responsibility. It's called no Excuses and it's in every language. All over the world. People just love the concept. So as soon as you start making excuses, as soon as you stop blaming someone else for something in your life, all your negativity stops and positive thinking flows in like a river. So that. And the second part of my golden triangle, once you've accepted responsibility, which is the first point, is setting goals. The very act of setting your goals and writing them down in a form that I teach in several different ways. My book on goal setting, which is just called Goals, is the best selling book on that subject in the world. And so you just, you set goals and you write them down and you review them every day. And as you do that, you become more positive, more focused. When you're working on your goals, you are a different person. And the third triangle is continuous learning is continually read, learn, write, upgrade your knowledge and skills. And those three, that golden triangle transforms people's lives. And all over the world, I get letters that come back to me saying, this book, no Excuses changed my life. Because making excuses is the foundation of negative thinking. And it requires you blame someone for something, you stop doing that, your whole life changes. Right. Right now, I just heard one liner. I've heard it before, but I just pass it on to you. In case you haven't heard it. It says being mad or angry with someone else is like drinking poison and wanting the other person to die. Yeah, yeah. So you heard that. I think that's a great one liner. I think if you're really, really grateful, you create an abundance related to your past. That's really what gratitude is because it's. You're grateful for what has gotten you here. And gratitude is a proactive skill. A lot of people make it a reactive skill in the sense, well, if somebody does something for me, I'm grateful for that. But the word gratitude, being grateful is related to the word appreciation. How many of you say, well, I really appreciate that. And appreciation is a really neat word because it's got that emotional sense, psychological sense, but it's also got an economic sense that things appreciate. Gold appreciates, land appreciates, stocks appreciate. And what appreciate. Could we add bitcoin to your list? Yeah, Bitcoin appreciates, you know, everything Peter's involved in appreciates. I hope so, because I've got. He's got some of my money, you know, I want it all to appreciate. I appreciate. Yeah, but what appreciation, what appreciation really means is that you just give value to something. In other words, you say, you know, there's qua, qua sitting right across from me. And I always appreciate qua. And you know, and I really appreciate, you know, I can just sit there and think about qua for a half minute. And, you know, I totally appreciate Babs, as everyone knows. You know, without Babs, I'm just a smart drunk, worried about the rent. And you know, I just appreciate and I think about the people I appreciate so much what Peter does. And that creates a higher value for Peter in my life. So this gratitude principle is one of them. And the other one is generosity. If you truly believe in abundance, you'll be generous with what you have, not worrying about how you're going to get paid back for it, you know, So I think that the twin, you know, and they're related to each other, but one of them is related to the past. It's appreciation because you're giving greater value to your experience up to the present moment. And then generosity is that you're making a bet on the future. See, I'm making a total bet on the future with Peter that it's Just going to get bigger and better in every way. And therefore anything that I contribute to that, I don't have to worry about what the return is. There's going to be a big return and I don't have to keep book on it. You know, I can't stand keeping book on things. So I see a lot of people who are super intelligent, but they're not great for. I see people who are very successful, but they're not generous. And I said, you know, you've got all the. You got all the hardware, but you don't have any of the software. And you need the software to actually make your way in the world. And you won't have to worry about competing because there's going to be so many opportunities for collaboration. Do people get how important that is? How? The amount of wealth, the amount of opportunities. I mean, it's an abundance of opportunities that we all have. Yeah. And it's a matter of what do you choose to do? Right. It's saying no to 99% to focus on the 1%, which is a big problem I have. And I, you know, coach helps me focus on that. Can we talk about the 25 years? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Can I also mention. No, no. Can you talk for a little bit now? I just want to highlight. I was being generous here. You're being very generous because what you just said is exactly how I'm doing my best to curate Genius Network, because I want it filled with people that are appreciative and reciprocal and useful and contributing. Yeah, they just want to be in the more I can build a room of these types of entrepreneurs that are high achievers with this, you know, this real focus and emphasis on being a giver. It just makes this community so much better. So, I mean, you just basically described exactly the goal and objective I have of filling Genius Network up with that sort of person with that mindset and that behavior. So 25 years. 25 years. Two things important. About 25 years, I was again here at Genius Network. I was about to go on, on stage. I was talking about my Abundance 360 program, which is what I spent all year preparing for. It's 360 CEOs that I coach in Beverly Hills. And Dan says to me as I'm about to go on stage, he says, peter, you should make the commitment that you're going to do this for 25 years. And it was off the cuff. And so I get up on stage and says, and I say, I'm committed to doing this for 25 years going to be. And really I think, I don't know if I shocked you or surprised you, but it was interesting, right? My world changed in that moment when I said I'm committing to doing this event for 25 years and for taking this community of CEOs with me on this 25 year journey. And part of what's interesting about that time frame is that coincides with what my co founder of Singularity University, my business partner, many businesses, Ray Kurzweil, calls the singularity. So we're on a countdown, if you would, to the singularity. This is the moment in time when computers are far more intelligent than people and more importantly that things are moving so fast that we're unable to actually predict what's coming next. The analog comes from that of a black hole, a gravitational singularity where light cannot escape. You can't actually see beyond the event horizon. So I palpably feel, I don't know if you do as well, that the speed of change is accelerating. You can graph this and look at it. The only constant is change and the rate of change is increasing. And so I spend, I start about now, November, December and January where I, I look at what's happened over the last 12 calendar months and I come up with proof of living in 2018. And it's incredible. We as humans tend to accept what is and forget that it wasn't always that way. But when you stop and you look at how fast things are changing, it's mind boggling. And for me it's exciting and there's ability to actually, actually predict the future. Ray Kurzweil is very good. He's got 86% prediction rate and it's really understanding the fundamentals of what's going on in computational power, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, all these things. And we're going to be disrupting every single industry. Healthcare, definitely. Education, for sure. Every industry that you're in is going to be changing dramatically in the next 10 years. And the question is, are you the leaf on the river or, or are you the river? Are you passive and letting it happen to you or are you guiding it? What are the five obstacles, pitfalls that I want to caution you against? The first is the devil of negativity. And all people who are as bright and creative as you are, you see, you pay a price. And you pay a price in that you have a rich imagination. And that imagination can not only envision beauty, greatness, achievement, it can envision the opposite. You can envision failure, you can envision people against you. You can envision impossibility. That's the devil negativity. I don't know if any of you felt a little hint of it when Peter was talking. When Peter was talking, we were all feeling excited. But I'll bet you some of you I know I was are thinking, God, I'm not as smart as he is. I can't keep up with all this stuff. There's no hope for me. I'm just a loser, you know, I might as well pack my bag and leave right now. The world is going to pass me by, you know, I'm too old anyway. Send me out to pasture. I've done all I can do. And you know, how can I? This guy's got it. I don't have it. And you know, that's the voice of negativity. And I have to see my advice in dealing with that. Don't ignore it. Because if you do, it'll keep knocking on your door. Recognize it, and then subject it to rational observation. So what I said to myself as I was listening to Peter, I said, peter doesn't want you to feel that way. He wants you to feel inspired. He's here to share a gift with you, take advantage of it. And sure, it's a lot, and sure he's way smaller, smart, but he's here to help you, share with you. So connect with him, work with him, grow with him. And I told the devil to piss off. But you gotta stare it down. You gotta squash it. It's there in almost everyone who is very imaginative. The imagination. One of my great heroes, Samuel Johnson, had a wonderful phrase, the hunger of the imagination. And he called worry a disease of the imagination. And when you start worrying and getting into these negative places, it's that disease of the. It's the imagination turning against itself and starting to poison and soil the best parts of you and your life. And the remedy when you fall into those states, if you can't talk yourself out of it and stare the devil down. And never worry alone. Profound advice. Never worry. Now, you want to pick your worry partner wisely. You don't want to pick some sadist who says, yeah, you are a loser, you know, but because the minute you connect with someone else, the minute you partner up, the two key variables in worry go away. The two key variables in toxic worry. Number one, heightened feeling of vulnerability. It has nothing to do with the reality. Feeling of vulnerability and diminished feeling of power and control. The minute you talk to someone, the minute you connect with someone, you feel more powerful. And less vulnerable. The situation hasn't changed one bit. The reality hasn't changed one bit. You're just suddenly, instantly better able to deal with it. A good analogy is if you're in a big dark room alone in a warehouse, you feel afraid, paranoid, scared. If you're in a big dark warehouse with someone, you laugh and giggle, you know you're not afraid. And this is one of the fundamental facts of life. One of the fundamental facts of life is that we in danger and distress need each other. We need to connect. And one of my fears about modern life is what I call the modern paradox. We have super connected electronically in ways that have changed the world for the better, magnificently. But we've been disconnecting interpersonally. And that's why your coming together here is so important. That's why you really couldn't do this conference virtually. Or you could do, but it wouldn't have nearly the impact. We really need each other. We need the human moment, not just the electronic moment. The electronic moment is great. Change the world. But don't think we can dispense with the human moment. We need that, particularly in dealing with negativity, in dealing with toxic worry, in dealing with these states that are very common amongst highly talented people that can absolutely sabotage you if you're not careful. Because in those states you make bad decisions, you back away from opportunities, you use drugs, you get into trouble. Okay, the next pitfall I'd like to point out is again, all these are two edged swords. They're paradox. But it's the flip side of one of your greatest strengths. One of your greatest strengths is your enthusiasm and curiosity. You are naturally enthusiastic, you are naturally curious. But guess what? You can become the victim of your own enthusiasm. You can over commit, you can lose focus, you can have so many good ideas that you're not able to nourish and develop any one of them to its own fullest. And you can have this chronic frustration of saying, gosh, I've got all these great ideas, I've got all these great contacts, I've got all these great resources, but my garden ain't growing. You know, I'm not getting the kind of full maturity of growth that I want to get. In other words, you have add and I want to plant the seed in your mind to take this notion of ADD seriously. While it's not a disorder, it is a trait. And take seriously considering if you might have it. Because I can tell you there's no condition in all of medicine that can change a person's life more dramatically for the better than the diagnosis and treatment of adult add. It's remarkable how you can go a quantum level up. Not only in your professional life, by the way, in your personal life as well. So consider that you might have this. If you are a visionary, a pioneer full of ideas, have trouble with follow through, impatient, low tolerance of frustration, tendency to procrastinate, tendency to go down blind alleys. If any of that sounds familiar, consider the that you might have this. And remember, the treatment in no way takes away your special sauce. Quite the opposite. It allows you to make maximum use of it. I often I make the analogy. Having ADD is like Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls is just a lot of noise and mist until you build a hydroelectric plant. Then you light up the state of New York. That's what the treatment of this condition in adults can do. So consider that. I can't talk to an audience like this and not have you. It's like Dean was saying. What am I obligated to say? I am obligated to tell you that there is a possibility to dramatically change your life for the better by considering this. And I won't go into the whole because we don't have time, but if you grab one of my books, my books are very straightforward and clear. Okay? The third one is more delicate. You all have achieved great success. You have achieved in most of you quite a lot of wealth. This allows you to become a jerk. See, because people will tend not to tell you. They will tend not to tell you that you're becoming a jerk. The most obvious example are professional athletes. These people walk around with these sycophants who just tell them what they want to hear and they behave like horrible jerks. 10 children with 10 different women, none of whom they care about treating people like scum, offering nickel tips. And they're flaming jerks. We all have it in us to become a jerk. Particularly when we become rich, famous and powerful. Give people permission, those who are closest to you, to tell you, you know, dad, you're changing. You know, Joe, you're changing. You're not. By the way, I didn't mean you Joe Polish. I meant Joe Blow. You. You know, you're not the humble, friendly, what you see is what you get kind of guy anymore. Your success is going to your head and it's not attractive. Now, you may continue to be highly effective. You may continue to be master of the universe. You may continue to change the world for the better. But on your deathbed, there's not going to be many people standing around feeling very sad. You may get lionized in your obituary, but you're not going to like yourself much. You're not going to leave the kind of legacy of love that is by far the most important legacy. So give others permission to give you that kind of feedback. I love the simple intervention which Dan taught me. If someone is exhibiting a difficult behavior, you don't have to have a year of psychotherapy. Just tell them to cut it out. And if they'll listen, that can save them a lot of time and money. Okay. The fourth pitfall that I want to point out to you is what I call the itch at the core of the entrepreneurial mind. Most entrepreneurs have an itch. Most of us with this trait feel a need to change our inner state. We need to do something to pump up the volume. We need to do something to make life seem more vivid and alive. When we wake up in the morning, life just isn't as gripping as we want it to be. We have this appetite for more. We have this desire to make life more vivid, to make life more intense, to somehow or other make it gripping enough that we can really engage. And that really is at the core of this truth trait. Now, you can't make the itch go away, nor should you want to. It's your greatest asset, but it can also be your worst enemy. So what you have to do is be careful how you scratch the itch. Be careful how you scratch the itch. The maladaptive ways of scratching the itch cause enormous trouble. Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, extreme danger seeking. You know, I had one patient who said I only feel focused and alive when I'm at the racetrack, the horses are coming down the home stretch, and I have a bet down that I can't afford to lose. I had another patient who said, I only feel really focused and alive when I'm making love to a woman and her husband is on the way home. You know, these are dangerous. These are not adapt, but they. Another one who said, I only. I only feel focused and alive when I'm skiing down a sheer face, knowing that I really don't have the skill to do it, hoping that I'll survive. And by the way, Peter's partner in writing writes about these extreme sports. What's his first name again? Steven Kotler. A wonderful man. And he talks about the states of flow that you can get into by courting danger. But it's not something I think we wouldn't want to risk our lives to scratch the itch. And yet that's what These folks tend to do in scratching the itch, they resort to danger, to addiction, to all manner of self destructive activities. What they're really seeking is adrenaline. What they're really seeking is nature's own stimulant medication, epinephrine, adrenaline. So what are adaptive ways of scratching the itch? Well, right at the top of the list is my favorite intervention, my favorite drug connection. I call it the Other Vitamin C, Vitamin Connect. And the beauty of Vitamin Connect is that it's infinite in supply and it's free. The sad part of Vitamin Connect is people don't take it seriously. They'd rather get a prescription for Prozac than spend time with a friend, than get a pet, than love somebody. And it's killing people. We live in a big epidemic of Vitamin Connect deficiency. And the symptoms are lethargy, loss of ambition, loss of hope, low grade depression. And these people are being medicated. And what they need to do is turn off their electronics and sit down and talk to somebody. I have nothing against electronics, I love them. They changed the world for the better. But we're seeing this growing addiction, this growing epidemic of what I call screen sucking at the expense of getting the kind of connection with other people you need. Number two in terms of adaptive ways of scratching the itch, physical exercise. My friend John Ratey wrote a great book called Spark the Revolutionary New Science of Exercise in the Brain, in which he lays out in absolute hard scientific detail the myriad ways in which physical exercise builds your brain. John calls it the miracle grow of the brain. It's not just good for your body and heart and bones, it's really good for your brain. And you don't have to just wait to go to the gym. When you're working on a project and you get stuck. Stand up and do 25 jumping jacks, do 10 push ups, do a few burpees, whatever, run up and down stairs a few times, you will push the reset button on your brain. It changes your brain chemistry dramatically within three minutes. So have that as a ready at hand remedy instead of the jar of M&MS. Or the Starbucks and the donut. A quick burst of exercise. And then the third particular way of scratching the itch that I recommend is a creative outlet. You all have come to this instinctively. You know that when you have a creative outlet, when you have a business that you're growing, you feel better. The reason I write so many books, I'm on my 20th book now. The reason I write so many books is not that I'm driven to write books. It's because if I don't have a book going, I get depressed. It's just that simple. If I don't have a book in process, I get depressed. I don't have to be working on it, but the fact that I have it in process gives me a creative outlet. I know it's there, and my unconscious is percolating away on it. The same with you guys with your businesses. The fact that you're growing them, the fact that you're here, the fact that you have it in mind, it gives you that creative outlet which scratches the itch. The final in my last 20 seconds pitfall may be the most dangerous of all the failure to take seriously and develop your loving connections. All the studies on health, longevity, success, and happiness in life come back to the importance of one love. Take it seriously, honor it. Nourish will pay you back over and over again. Thank you. Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. They're over here. Do it now. Come on. Thank you. Watch them.