Episode 502: The Epiphany All High Achievers Have with Gus Gonzalez

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. I'm here with Gus Gonzalez. Gus has been in a lot of different businesses. He's been in Venezuela, he's been in Miami, he's been in Atlanta. Now he's building a new dream home down on the coast of Florida, the Panhandle. He's accumulated a lot of business success and it's hard fought. He had to dig. And by his own admission, he started off as a weakling. Yeah. And you know, he just, it's all right if you start that way. You can't stay that way. If you're going to lead things and you're going to make things happen, you got to develop, you got to grow a spine and a toughness and you're never going to do that unless the light bulb goes into your, on in your mind about yourself and your responsibility and things like that. So welcome back, Gus.

Thank you for having me, man. I'm excited, I'm excited. It's a great conversation.

So as you were, we were wrapping up the other episode. I just couldn't, I had to cut you off because this deserves, you know, a spotlight all unto itself is like what brought you out of that excuse making cycle of failure? You know, I write a serial winner, the cycle of winning and jumping into the cycle of winning. And you know, you do that because you get the taste of winning. You never want to lose it. And the people who never get into that cycle and fail think that they get too, you know, Bob Safford, he's gone now, but Bob Safford had the greatest thing. He said don't lose too long.

Yeah.

Because you get used to it.

You get used to it.

Don't fail too long. You know, it's all right to fail, but you can't let yourself do it too long because that knocks your edge off, you know, and it doesn't bother you quite as much. And so anyway, talk about how you went through there. You talked, you said there were two things.

Yeah. I mean, this is late in life. This is the year 2000, which I was 35 years old. Okay.

Yeah.

So. But I have been trying, trying, trying, trying, but not successfully later. I understand. Because I'm lacking, I lack the tools personally. Right. To that I did not. And again, mostly character things. Right. So I go through around the same time. There's a convergence of things that happen kind of at the same time. And one, it's obviously, there's a very huge personal side to this, right? Because the business side is obviously impacted by your personal life. But at the same time, a lot of things came into my life. Art Williams was one of those things, okay? Which has been a mentor to both of us, right? Art Williams was one of those things on a more very personal level. Christ was another one of those things, right? I'm talking about within a three month period, okay? And I almost, because of my doing, almost divorced my wife, almost got separated from my wife all around the same time. And then our business, our financial services business started. There's a lot of mentorship and a lot of things going on, but that I thought I could have. So all these things come together and, and I realized that. So I start failing in my life, I start failing in my marriage, and I start failing in my business that I attempt to start. I come from a mortgage background and I was making 100 grand a year and I thought it was because of me. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. It's like those people that think they are great entrepreneurs because they're riding the wave in real estate and when the thing crumbles, so does their fortune and their fame, right? If you happen to be riding a wave, the worst thing you can do is just think that is all you. You created this thing, right? So I came with that level, that kind of cockiness, right? Thinking, you know, I got this and I was, I almost lost everything at the same time and at that moment. And that's why the crisis figure is so critical for me also in this conversation. Because that was kind of the only thing that I, that I had to hold on to, right? That felt, that felt real in my life and that gave me a, like a position to be able to process the failure, right, without. Without killing my own self esteem, my self identity, right? I use this unconditional love that I felt for the first time in my life to kind of propel say, okay, I need to process this from a place of, hey, I am not seeing myself the way I was designed to be. I need to go back and readjust and make changes.

What kind of readjustments and changes did it dawn on you that you needed to make?

Well, I made a list. This is in 2001. I made a literal list. I said, okay, what would a successful person look like? And I started making a list for. On the 1st. I did it for my business and Then a little bit of that on the personal side too, right? So I came up with. I just. Everything that came. It was like a brainstorming session, and everything that came into my mind, I just wrote it. For example, being on time, for example, right? Having great relationships or a relationship ability, right? With people, you know, being persistent, you know, sticking to things, learning. I did like 40 different things, and I literally scored myself from one to 10. And I was brutally honest without going overboard and say, okay, I'm going to be honest. When, for example, character. I gave myself a one out of a ten. And I said, this needs to change. So I chose three things that out of the whole list that I needed to work on that I would concentrate first, because you cannot change everything at the same time. But I said, where can I have the biggest impact in my life? So I chose character was one, right? And relationships was another, and so on. And I actually went back the second year in O2 and revisited the whole list and rescored myself. And sure enough, I had improved. And so did everything else around me in my life. My marriage improved, my business improved. And then this happened again in 03 and again and 01, 02 and 03. By the end of 03, it was one of these happenstance things. I don't think there are coincidences, but I was ready. There's this thing that. This saying that says that when the student is ready, the teacher appears, right? So all these things came into play. We used to have in our business this thing called Voice tale, where people would move messages, encouraging messages or something like that, around different teams. And I heard a message of somebody that was not on my team. And Gary Ginsburg, he's playing golf with a guy that sold a pizza company. A guy from America sold a pizza company in the US For a billion dollars. And he asked him, what would you recommend if you could just tell me one thing to be successful? Well, read these three books, right? And think and Grow Rich is one of them, right? Think like a Winner is another one. And so on. So I wrote them down bottom, read them in six weeks, right? This is now October of 03. And out of that came the next level, the next wave of change. And then I got a hold of something you did with Bill or Ender that I could use specifically for my business. And, man, I'm telling you, from there, the growth. There is a Bible verse that says, you know that all of a sudden, you know that heavens open, right? And all these blessings come. Napoleon Hill says that when success starts coming you figure, oh, my God, where have you been all my life? It feels kind of easy. But you were. You were not. You need to become the person that's ready to attract the success you're. You're looking for. You don't chase success. You kind of become that person that attracts that success. It's kind of weird to explain. That's what happened to me.

And the thing about character, would you say, is kind of a nebulous subject for an ignored subject for many people. I hate the fact that so many parents are obsessed about educating their kids on facts and, you know, all of this stuff. And they're moral weasels, you know, they have no backbone, you know, they don't have any responsibility, they don't have any accomplishments, you know, and. But they know a lot of stuff. They're full of facts. You know, they're full of facts. They got degrees to show they're full of facts. But when it comes to applying those things and staying in there, and the character thing, just to say, when you were working on character, you're talking about. These are all things related to making you proud of yourself. It seems like.

Yep, 100%. When, man. When you're. And I think God was preparing me for this, because when you're. When your success exceeds your character, you're going to implode. Everything is going to. Somehow you're going to lose somewhere. Right? So, absolutely, I was not proud of myself because I knew I had hustled my way through life, and because of Art Williams, I started to think about those things. At some point you have to. Sometimes you don't know what you don't know. You don't think about things. Right. And then somebody points out that that's why it's so important. I think we alluded to this a little bit earlier. That's why it's so important to be around the right people, to be in the right environments, because you will hear things and learn how to process things that you never heard before. Maybe you did, but not processed the same way. So when I heard Art say, I want to be somebody, you know, I want to be somebody I'm proud of. And that resonated with me in a way that I never experienced before. You know, I just didn't know how to get there. You know what I mean? Right.

And of course, people are wondering about, you know, they'd like to tap into some of that kind of stuff. It's on you. There's a lot of it on YouTube under Art Williams, Best with no Spaces Art Williams Best Videos. He's got a bunch of stuff there and highly edited and stuff you used to have to listen to three or four hours. Four hours. In five or ten minutes you get the essence, essence of it on YouTube. So anyway, but thanks so much Gus. This has just been great.

You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Again.

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