Episode #677 - Motivation Is Subjective: What’s Yours? with Mike Begg, Co-Founder of AMZ Advisors

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. Hey everyone, we've got an exciting young talent to pick his brains today with. And that is Mike Beck. Hello, Mike.

Hi, Larry. Thank you for having me here today.

Yeah, serial entrepreneur. Best describes as a serial entrepreneur, but he's mainly co founder chief now. Anyways, chief strategist, chief marketing officer of AMZ Advisors. And the reason why that should interest you is because Mike and his team have generated for them and their clients over a half a billion in sales. That's 500 million in sales on Amazon. And so those things don't happen by themselves. And Mike, what we do about the podcast is we kind of people listen to things like podcasts like this and books and tapes and nothing because they're looking for wow, they're looking for magic, they're looking for excitement in their lives. And that can't happen unless you actually do something big and unique. And you don't do big and unique things without starting small, starting confused, starting with everybody against you, and starting frustrated and going through navigating some real. It's just like a war, you know, you're not going to win a war without a whole lot of prep, a whole lot of energy and a whole lot of things that went wrong. And you figured things, solutions out on the run. And so the thought process, the thinking behind that, when you win the war, you have big numbers. It shows that you made some good decisions along the way in addition to working hard. That's what we like to tap into, is your background and how you navigated this thing. And so let's start where you started out when you were a kid, would you have thought you would see yourself doing what you're doing now and what was in your mind that you really, as a priority, really wanted to do when you were growing up?

I would say no, I never saw myself being an entrepreneur. My family, my parents, they weren't entrepreneurs. My mom's a nurse, my dad worked in a factory. Surprisingly, their parents were entrepreneurs. So I don't know, maybe there was something there that rubbed off on me in a little bit. But I'm from Connecticut originally. The entire area I'm from is a lot of investment banking, a lot of private equity, venture capital, those types of businesses. So I kind of always saw myself going in that direction, working in finance on Wall street or wherever. And that was really the road that I saw myself on. And there's been some turns along the way that obviously got me to where I am today. And I'm happy for that. But, no, I don't think I ever saw myself as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as an executive like this, my own company. So it's been quite a unique journey to get to this point.

Yeah, and that's an interesting thing. Early influences, you know, the early environmental influences. Like, if you grow up in a small town in Iowa or something and you're. Everybody knows a farmer, you got to be thinking about farmer. Or if you grow up where everybody's in the factory, it does. It can influence you. And the idea of growing up in Connecticut, when I think of Connecticut, you think of. Basically, it's wrong, but you think of wealth. You know, if you go and you see the big estates and the big homes and the people, they're outside of New York. And a lot of the big financial companies have moved out to Connecticut. And so growing up in that environment, I guess you run across people. Those are their jobs. That's your family's friends in the neighborhood or your parents of some of your friends. It's hard not to get infected, at least exposed to it. And unless it repels you, it probably would attract you in some way. Where did you start first start noticing that kind of influence, and what kind of impact did it have?

I would say some of the first. I don't know. I can't say. Like, there was a specific age or a specific time when I started noticing these things. But one thing that really stuck out for me was when I was younger, playing lacrosse. I mean, lacrosse itself is a very preppy sport. It's typically played in a lot of these wealthier towns. So I remember going to tournaments and practices and games in some of these other towns, and, you know, the dads are showing up in Ferraris and Porsches and. And Lamborghinis and whatever. And it's like, whoa. Like, what is this stuff? Like, this is crazy. I mean, it's kind of. It's obviously very shallow and very. How do you say it? Vain to see these things and be interested in them. But in the same way, it's something that sticks out so much that you kind of pay attention to it. And you're right. There's big homes, big houses. My friend's parents were a lot of times involved in those types of things or in those types of fields. So it was kind of where I started getting exposures. And when I Noticed the most was probably maybe around, like, seventh, eighth grade when I really started to think about that a lot more.

Yeah. Because a lot of people grow up, and a lot of people listening on this grew up in environments where they didn't get exposed to things like that. And what they got exposed to is I remember when our company had a first convention in Hawaii. And I went over to Hawaii. Unbelievable hotel, super expensive, and it's full. You know, I walked in there, I said, wait a minute. Because my father was a sergeant in the Air Force, and I grew up in that type base housing and those type things. And you. You grow up hearing more predominantly than not. Nobody's got any money. Everybody's struggling to survive. You clip coupons, be frugal. You know, the only way to accumulate. They save $10 a week for 80 years or something like that, you know, and the idea that people have, you know, I looked in, I could not notice that a lot of these were young families. They not only came in, they were young. Somehow they had the money and they brought their family. And they weren't here with a company in a convention like I was. They just decided to go to Hawaii for. And so it's just like, I remember definitely having to think somebody's been lying to me, that nobody has money. Because it seems to be a whole lot of people got a whole lot of money out there, and they're doing. They gotta be doing something that I'm not doing. I gotta find out about that. And as you're growing up, it does give you a leg up to be exposed to that stuff. Because I think, of course, it's superficial and money's not everything, and things will only set it. Material things only satisfy you so much. But I think there's a real value in seeing a Bugatti or a Ferrari or a motorcycle or incredible estate home like that. If it lights a fire in you, you know, what I've seen is a lot of people get exposed to things like that. In fact, I used to do a presentation in big events where to kind of get things going. And I would show some of the places I'd been. Some of the things at that point I'd own or my friends owned and just showing big things. Yachts and motorcycles and homes and vacations. And what happens from the crowd is that you give this ooh all the way through it, and it's a different ooh from a different part of the crowd. The different slide goes up because different things turn different people on. But, like, if you ooh Over a motorcycle. Maybe that's what you need to get yourself out of your rut and to be thinking about doing better things and not wasting your life. Because early story in our company was one of the biggest, most successful guys came in because he wanted a Winnebago and that's all he wanted. He wanted to work long enough to get a Winnebago. But then once he made enough money for the Winnebago, by this time, he didn't want the Winnebago anymore. You know, he wanted something bigger and better.

Of course things change. Things always change over time. And I think you're 100% right. I mean you get these exposure to things. There's things that are going to motivate you and different things motivate different people. I think when I was moving on from a little bit where I was younger, I started I got the idea of vision boards and like putting the. What you actually want on a board and actually visualizing it and you know, all those types of things. But I think, I don't think it had a great impact. But there were certain things that were on there that are more tied to wealth, more tied to luxury, more tied to like higher end things. It clearly shows that there was an interest for me. And eventually getting to that point, it just took me a while to figure out that I'm never going to make it there as an employee and I have to do it for myself.

Yeah. And the thing is on those vision boards, the thing about that, it, it doesn't have to be just things. I mean, it was long. If you reach the point where you feel like, you know, relationships, you know, are important or I need to have more values and spiritual life, you know, I need to have more fulfillment. You can put things like that up in your. That is going to satisfy you that you don't have yet to give yourself a direction. But the idea of having a visual picture can be very, very powerful because it's really, it's the first step to making it real. And then because if you see it, you're liable to talk about it or think about it or notice that happening around you and also noticing how people that have those things operate and you start, can start picking up ideas and how old were you when you got your vision board up?

That was, I think during college when I started doing that. So it was definitely past, past high school, past the growing up years when I really started to think more about what I wanted that entire time, through high school, through, you know, eighth grade and that Time. The one thing I was focused on was playing Division 1 sports. And, you know, I played lacrosse at the Division 1 level. So I think that was the one thing that I was mainly focused on at that point. I thought it was going to make some difference to me. I guess the main goal that I wanted to get out of it. My dream school was Yale. I grew up 40 minutes from Yale. I trained with their club teams. Like, I was positive. I wanted to go to Yale. My grandfather went to Yale. I had, like nine relatives that went to Yale. I was like, oh, this is where I want to go. And I didn't get it. So all that work, it didn't work out. And then I kind of had to start rethinking about, you know, what I wanted, what my goals were, what I wanted to focus on, what I wanted to work towards over time.

And what did you. Let's just think about your friends, the people you were around. What were. Were you different? Were you thinking of different things, or were you thinking of the same things they were thinking? Get a job, get out, get in a good school?

No, that's a tough one. I mean, a lot of my friends, like I said, their families came from finance. They came from other areas where they had money, they had resources and assets that, like some of my. One of my best friends, parents has a manufacturing company that is very good size. So I think a lot of them necessarily weren't thinking about money or thinking about career goals because they always had something that they could fall back on. For me, I didn't have something I could fall back on, so I kind of had to start thinking of what I wanted to get out of or what fields I wanted to get into so I could start getting the goals or achieving the goals that I wanted to hit in the long term. So I think maybe I was thinking a little bit different, at least with my immediate friend group. But I know a lot of other people around my age group and in other groups were probably focused on the same things. It's just the people I hung out with were a little bit different.

Well, it is one of the things that influences us as we go through life is the way we respond to big problems, little problems. Growing up, we develop a style, a way of dealing with roadblocks, let's say. And so you run into a major roadblock. You have this dream of going to Yale, which was probably to your benefit that you didn't go to Yale. By the way, I've got lots of stories about that, but about Yale alumni, but I could tell you off camera sometimes, so it probably worked to your advantage. But no offense, Yale's a wonderful school. I love Yale. But anyway, the thing that. How did that impact you? Because, you know, as what happens is we're all going to have major roadblocks and disappointments, and we don't know that, you know, at an early age, but you got to respond, and you had to respond. And what kind of recalibration did you go in your mind? You know, I'm not going to be doing lacrosse. There's no National Lacrosse League, you know, now, and I'm not going to be MVP and Hall of Famer in that. And so I'm not going to be a Yale. So what kind of recalibration did you go?

So I think there were two things I would say that changed. One being that I had to re. One being that I naturally let my stubbornness kind of take over and be like, you know what? They think I'm not good enough. I'm going to prove it. I'm going to figure out another way to do it. And it pushed me a lot harder. I mean, I was always good in school, but it pushed me to try even harder in school and continue to prove that I could do these things. And at the same time, I still wanted to play lacrosse. I looked for other options at the Division 1 level. Uh, reached out through a lot of the connections I had, a lot of the coaches that I was connected with. And I was eventually able to go to Stony Brook University, which is literally like, it's in New York. It's probably 40 minutes, like, as the crow flies from Yale University. So it was super close. But, yeah, I mean, I doubled down. I was like, you know what? Going to Yale doesn't mean that you're a smart person. Working hard means that you're a smart person. And then from there, I just tried to apply myself in another way to kind of get over the disappointment of not getting what I originally was aiming for.

Yeah, because what you have to do at times like that is move forward. You got to move. And people who say, well, I've just reached a dead end. You never reach a dead end. There's always a thought in your mind, a person to call, a thing to do, something to check. There's always a next step. And as long as you've got a next step, you're not dead. You're only paralyzed. You're only dead when you're paralyzed, and you just stop. And so you go forward with what you know, and Sometimes that can turn. I hear all the time on this, where people have been blockaded and going where they thought the direction was, where they have most excitement about going. And then they got over here, and without a big block like that, they wouldn't have gone. But then the heavens opened up in another direction. And so as you get over there, you now have got to find another option. But then you've got to get yourself excited about that. And the one thing that we've got to sell ourselves, you know, you got to coach yourself. And what I hear. There you were, you coached yourself into saying, wait a minute. All the smart people are not at Yale or Ivy League or whatever. Once you get. It's what you do with what you know that makes a difference. And I think that's a dis for people who go to the elite schools. And you see this in Japan a lot. These kids grow up and they work like 120 hours a week from preschool to get their education, and then when they get their degrees, they get out of college. They're basically worthless drunks for a period of time because they think the world's going to owe them a living, and they're disappointed to find out, no, I got to keep working. And so as I really think the people in the Division 2 have an advantage because we've hired a lot of people out of Division 1 and Division 2, and the Division 1 people have the credentials in the brains, but they just don't have the hunger. The Division 2. The great thing about Division 2 people, graduates, is they know they got to work, and they don't mind working. They want to whip somebody's butt, you know what I'm saying? They want to prove it. They want to move up. They're upwardly mobile. They were kept out of Division 1 on the education, but they're coming. I think there's kind of an advantage.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of the same point that I was making about not getting in DL. It's like, how do you. It's like having a chip on your shoulder. It's like, how are you going to take advantage of this and use that to grow as a person to push yourself to be better? And, you know, from my standpoint, I worked even harder when I was at Stony Brook. We were, you know, top 20 program in the country. We had some of the best players in the country. One of my teammates actually went on to become the player of the year his senior year. So I was with people that were busting their ass every single day. And I think that's one of the things that made me work extremely hard or taught me to work extremely hard is by seeing other people around me working so hard and realizing, if they can do it, why can't I do it? At the same time, you having other sources of motivation outside of yourself is good, but you need to also be able to find the motivation internally to keep pushing and people being better. To me, I could have been like, yeah, you know what, they're better. I don't want to try as much. Or you use that as a means to step up and be like, I need to rise to their level, to be at the same place. So I think from my standpoint, that's where I kind of learned a lot of my work ethic and putting in the hard work, grinding, getting through everything. And that's paid off in spades throughout my career and throughout my time as an entrepreneur.

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