Everybody Has Hidden Talents with Jerome Rerucha

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.

How important is it to be competitive? What do you see about the competitive nature? Because I've seen you, you know, one thing that you, you categorize people, you know, when we're talking is like, do you have some A level or, you know, top level people? Not everybody's, not everybody's the same. Right, right.

Yeah, but everybody's got hidden talents. I mean, everybody, especially when you get into some of the strength sports, it's not like bodybuilding, where you probably got to be a little more genetically gifted for sure. To be a bodybuilder, where in a strength sport it's like, hey, you can be epically bad at some things that are required for competition, but you're also going to be good at something. So, like, there's nobody can be bad at all. Three power lifts, you know, you may be only good at one of them, but you never know. I never was. I never was great at any of them. Like any competition when I'd go to nationals or worlds and it's like, yeah, pretty much somebody is always. And maybe multiple people, they're going to out squat me, they'll out bench me, they'll out deadlift me. But in the end, I had a good total, so I was just kind of Mr. Consistent, you know, I never had a canon. I wasn't going to like, ooh, wow, anybody with any one of my lifts. And so I'm never going to be in the powerlifting hall of fame either. But it taught me a lot. You know, it makes you think three dimensionally, you got to balance it with life. So as you're again, wasn't academically the sharpest tool in the shed either. School was not my favorite thing. So you worked really hard in school. You worked really hard lifting and you just didn't make excuses. You showed up, you didn't skip for any reason, whether it was school, lifting or work. And you just put your head down and you set goals and you just.

Worked as you travel around. And right from the beginning, you start traveling in these circles and you start talking to people that are high achievers. What do you remember now that stood out to you then?

I can honestly say. Would you say that? And there's a lot of people that don't get support or they get torn down before people build them up. Now in my case, I could say generally people that aren't very high achievers necessarily, and that's just where they're holding themselves at. They're always going to try to tear you down. But you get around high achievers if you just hold yourself a certain way and you're really engaged and you're polite and you don't have this big giant ego, but they can see whether you got an it factor or not. Like the high achievers and successful people were always way nicer and way more helpful. Even when you were at the novice of novice levels. Like, the high achievers were always like, what can I do to help you now? You had to go find them because they definitely weren't in my sphere of influence. But, you know, I know you do some grunt work early on. You know, it's. You actually worked some of the powerlifting meets. You weren't lifting in them. And, you know, just some of the people that you were just like, holy cow. And wow. Of. Of what physical specimens, they were like, they were nicer to you than everybody else was. So. And you just got to look for those. And then if somebody shoots you down, you're, you know, like you said, you got to have a certain amount of successes, you know, but most people have a lot, lot of failures. They just are a little desensitized to it and. And you're looking for that. One or two positives that can carry you just.

Yeah, it's amazing. It does help you absorb the sting of unnecessary criticism when you realize most of the people that are throwing garbage at you, they're living in a garbage pile. Yeah, more or less.

And a lot of them put themselves there. You know, some people are born into really unfortunate situations, and I don't take that lightly. And I am compassionate towards people like that. I'm in the health business, whether on the clinical side and, you know, outside of that, there's a lot of devastating traumas in the world. But you see so many people that had it a hundred times worse than I did, and you are looking for examples. When you're not born with advantages, all you want to do is, you know, you want to find an example that started where you're at or below where you're at, and they made it to where you want to go and, you know, it's done. It's so easy to get inspired, you know. And so in the, in the fighter world, I mean, the majority of those people come from absolutely nothing. Total dysfunction. And how they have trained their minds and body, I mean, Fighters, to me, are still one of the most impressive people on the planet because, a, it's physically hard, but, oh, my gosh, it is way mentally harder than the bizarre, inhuman levels of physical effort they're able to put into it. So when you just kind of take that level of dedication, even if you're not a fighter, but it's, like, bad if you put that kind of effort into anything, whether you want to be a mathematician or an artist or whatever, you know, that drive you see in other people and how many failures and how many things work against them, but they just keep going and they get stronger. The bigger the storm, the harder they fight.

And, you know, there's a thing on. I just saw this. Showtime has a documentary on McEnroe, and it wasn't always pleasant. His father was a mad driver, you know, was never good enough, and. But it did. He said. He said, just once I'd like to walk off the court and have my dad, who was his manager, say, you know, great job, son. Unbelievable. And then not follow it up with more tennis talk, you know. Yeah, be a dad for a while. And eventually wound up firing his dad over that. He said, dad, it's not because I'm mad. It's because I love you. I just want to have you as a dad. And his dad. His dad didn't understand that at all, you know. Yeah, he. He never accepted the. That has been a good idea, you know, but the thing was that incessant drive, you know, like, McEnroe was not the biggest guy out there and not the most talented. And this, in fact, one of his great strengths was he never really would. So much of his, you know, swinging the racket and all this. So much of his stuff was dink, you know, you know, he could take. He could take the toughest shot and just touch it, and it would, you know, either volley back or drop in the net. And, you know, so much of his was not the big power stroke, but it was just finding a way to get the ball back over the net one more time than the other guy.

And there's a lot of right ways you do. You got to find what you're good at. I mean, if you're not a huge, powerful person and you're trying to win a tennis game, game via power, it's like, probably is never going to work. But, boy, you can really work all sorts of parts of that game. You can total, totally diffuse power if that's the strength in that other person, and that's how you want to Control, tempo.

How do you, you know, when you're coaching your. What did you learn from the lifting career that served you in your business in terms of dealing with plateaus and, you know, when you reach 11, you're successful and this, that and the other. But it's like, there's got to be something more, you know, and, you know, I, you know, again, it's the same kind of thing you said you started with. Like, nobody knew you had this force inside of you. Well, a lot of times you're. When you have success, you reach a certain level of success. People can't believe it, this or the other, but inside yourself, you know, like, no, this is not, this is not the whole thing. And you have to launch again. But how, how have you, what have you learned from the, the lifting that you would carry over, say, possibly helped you in carrying over into business? Yeah.

So even, even in the time, like you look at strength and fitness, every 10 years, it goes through an epic quantum jump of improvement. I mean, people were fantastic and strong 50 years ago. There was amazing people. And a lot of those principles still hold true today. But you just see that evolution of it, and make no mistake, like, what took me 14 years to win one world title, I could coach somebody else in four years to win that world title. I mean, you know, most people do. So it took me a lot longer, a lot more dedication, you know, that it does the average person. But so in that you do you learn rules of business as well. You know, I just wasn't, I didn't have the Midas touch, didn't have a golden opportunity. It wasn't like, I got one big break. But you did get prepared for it. So the guy who did coaches at lifting, he gave us a really good foundation. Now things have changed a tremendous amount. But those same standard principles he taught us hold true. But he would even tell us, too, before any great lift was done in competition, they ran it through their head lots and lots of times. So there was always, we were always trained with that aspect of a little bit of mind over matter. You know, you mentally have to do the lift before you physically can do the lift. And then you also have to sleep good enough, you got to eat good enough, you got to stretch good enough in order to do these lifts that were programming for you to do. So also in business, it's kind of like, all right, and it's going to take time and then to develop. So then even in business, it's like, all right, am I doing the things, Am I thinking properly Am I doing properly, you know, in order to reach these next business goals that I'm looking for? And sometimes when you don't, you know, you don't have a mentor, you don't have people you can physically look at. One thing I always had to do, because I didn't. I mean, I had help people that helped me out some, but I was an observer. So I would just really hunt and look for people that were successful that I thought were really good people. And they had personality characteristics that I really aspired to, but yet they had success that, you know, so they were a combination of maybe financial success or strength success, but they also had a personality that they held themselves in a very positive way. So in that aspect, you do you just score yourself regularly? Am I doing these things? Am I doing these things mentally? And even in the gym, there were certain days where, God, especially when you're in chiropractic school, you're taking 30 hours of classes that's not even studying or labs. So there's times you're sitting in a chair for 40 hours a week in class that's not even studying. And then you got to do your homework on top of that. Plus, when you're born poor, you know, I was working 20, 30 hours a week, thankfully, just at a gym, watching the front desk. So basically I just got paid to study. So that was. Otherwise there's only so many, so much time in a day. And then you turned all that off. And I had a group of guys then in chiropractic school, so that helped. As we're talking about, well, how did you keep motivated? So training in high school in that barn that was freezing cold or super hot, that lasted a couple years. And then I went to college and that was a new training crew and other people that were really competing at a national level already. So that kept it very fresh. You know, you were motivated. Now you're around people at a much higher level than you. And so that stayed for how many years? And then I went from there to chiropractic school and I ended up going to Atlanta. And one of the main reasons I ended up picking going to Atlanta is Coffee's gym was only like 2 miles from the chiropractic school. And Coffee's gym was world famous for pumping out elite strength athletes, whether it's Olympic lifters, a lot of power lifters there, some bodybuilders, little strawman, but, you know, that was again, a whole nother group of people. And I never wanted to be the strongest person in the gym and I wasn't so I never trained anywhere where I was the strongest person in the gym. There's different classes, different weight classes, open divisions, you know, drug free divisions. So I always definitely was striving to be the strongest in the world in my division but I never wanted to be the strongest person in the gym. You're just another regular guy. I'm squatting with people spotting them regularly who are squatting a thousand pounds and I'm trying to do you know, mid sevens and get as close to 800 as I can't, you know, to be realistic about it.

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