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 Begg. Hello, Mike.

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

Yeah, serial entrepreneurs. 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 are, you know, people listen to things like a podcast 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, you know, things, solutions out on the run. And so you got, you know, 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, you know, so that's what we like to tap into is, is, you know, your background and how you navigated this thing. And so let's start where you started out. Would, 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 you 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. Uh, 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, you know, 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. Uh, you know, working in finance on Wall street or, you know, wherever. And that was really the road that I saw myself on. And, you know, 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, you know is a farmer. You got to be thinking about, you know, farmer. Or if you grow up where, you know, 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 know, you think of. Basically, it's. 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 there 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, 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. 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, you know, tournaments and practices and games in some of these other towns, and, you know, the dads are showing up in Ferraris and Porsches 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, 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 the exposures. And when I noticed the most was probably maybe around like seventh, eighth grade. And 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. First convention in Hawaii.

And.

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. You know, because my father was a sergeant in the Air Force and I grew up, you know, in that type, you know, base housing and those type things. And you. You grow up hearing more predominantly than not, you know, nobody's got any money. Everybody's, you know, struggling to survive, you know, you know, you clip coupons, you know, be. Be frugal, you know, 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, not notice that a lot of these were young families. You know, 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 haw. 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. And I, you know, I got. 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 sat at 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, you know, an 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, you know, things, you Know, at that point, you know, I'd own or my friends owned and there's, you know, showing big things, you know, yachts and motorcycles and homes and vacations and, you know, and you, what happens from the crowd is that you get 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 off, you know. But like if you ooh over, you know, 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, you know, because, you know, 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, 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, you know, 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 knew all those types of things. And 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 doesn't have to be just things. I mean, as long as if you reach the point where you feel like relationships are important or I need to have, have, you know, I need to have more of a values and spiritual life, you know, I need to have more fulfillment. You know, you could put things like that up in your. That's going to satisfy you that you don't have yet to give yourself a direction. But you know, 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, that was, I think, during college when I started doing that. So it was definitely, you know, past. Past high school, past the, the growing up years when I really started to think more about what I wanted. You know, 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, I don't know, 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 have, 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 I, what my goals were, what I wanted to focus on, what I wanted to work towards over time.

And what did you. Your. Let's just think about your, 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, you know, 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 them. 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, you know, the people I hung out with were a little bit different.

Well, it is. You know, one of the things that influences us as we go through life is the way we respond to big problems, little problems growing up, you know, we. We develop a style, a way of dealing with roadblocks, let's say. And so you run into a major roadblock. You know, you have this dream of going to Yale, which was probably to your benefit that you didn't go to Yale, by the way. And I've got lots of stories about that, but about Yale alumni, but I could tell you off camera sometime, but. So it probably worked to your advantage. But no offense, Yale's a wonderful school. I love Yale. But anyway, the thing that. That. How did that impact you? Because, you know, as what happens is we're all going to have major roadblocks and disappointments. You know, 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. At 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, you know, 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. You know, I looked for other options at the Division 1 level, 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, you know, 40 minutes, like, as the crow flies from Yale University. So it was super, 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 got a next step, you're not dead. You're only paralyzed. And 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. You know, I hear all the time on this where people have been blockaded and going where they thought the direction was, where they had most excitement about going. And then they got over here, and without a big, you know, block like that, they wouldn't have gone. But then, you know, the heavens opened up in another direction. And so as you get over there, you're. You now have got to find another option. But then you've got to get yourself excited about that. And the one thing that, you know, we've got to sell ourselves, you know, you've got to coach yourself. And when I hear. There you were, you. You coached yourself into saying, wait a minute, you know, you know, all the smart people are not at Yale or Ivy League or whatever. And once you get. It's what you do with what you know that makes a difference. And. And I think that's a disadvantage, you know, for people who go to the elite schools. And you see this in Japan a lot. You know, 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, too, 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 to. You know, the great thing about Division 2 people, graduates, is they know they got to work and they don't mind working, you know, and they want to flip somebody's butt, you know what I'm saying? They want to prove that they want to move up. You know, they're upwardly mobile. They were kept out of Division 1 on the education, but they're coming, you know, and so. So 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 at 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, people being better, to me, I could have been like, ah, 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, you know, putting in the hard work, grinding, getting through everything. And that's played, you know, that's paid off in spades throughout my career and throughout my, you know, time as an entrepreneur.

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