Fame – Power – Money: Three Things That Drive People with Mitch Joel

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 just curious how you would define what you were attracted to early on growing up and what grabbed your attention of what you thought you would like to do and how that compares with what you're doing now.

Yeah, I mean that's two questions. Question one is, yeah, I was interested in music and I studied music post secondary as a, as a bass player and I played in bands and battle of bands and things like that. But then at a young age I got this exposure to music writing and journalism and then I, it felt like I was, I was kind of juggling both. So am I going to be a player? And I actually leaned more towards the business side of it because I liked the media, I liked the advertising, I liked the content, I liked the writing more than I liked the practicing and playing live. So choosing. And again, this is, you know, what would have been senior high school for American audiences. But we call it sage up here, which is great. After grade 11 you do two or three years of this. It's almost like pre college study. I realized there that I really wanted to be in the music business, not just playing music. So that was one thing. And that was always. I mean I remember being really young and reading Circus magazine and not looking at whether or not it was Gene Simmons from Kiss on the COVID or Jim Morrison from the Doors, but, but I'd be looking at the byline, who's this person who got to sit down with all these. So I was really attracted to the storytelling component of it from, you know, as long as I could remember. Irony of. Irony being the fact that I was able to eventually in my career write a cover story on Gene Simmons of Kiss for Circus magazine. So that was a nice little hat really to the work that I did. Yeah. Now when you say what drove you, I can only really reflect on it by reflecting on, I believe in general what drives people are three things. Fame, power and money. It could be all three. I believe that one always dominates. And by the way, when I say fame, I want to put it into a bit of a definition. Fame is really not about TikTok fame or YouTube fame. What I mean by that is somebody who wants their ideas to get a lot of attention. And I think that if I were to create the hierarchy for myself, fame, money and power was kind of my model That I just wanted my ideas to reach as broad of an audience as possible. But it was also very important for me to have a financial outcome of it. And power is really a byproduct for me. I think power driven people are more CEO based when they're jumping from company to company or government. A politician would fit the model lot better for being a power driven type of Persona. So for me it wasn't the celebrity fame, it was just the ideas Seth Godin likes to call them, getting your ideas to spread. So that was again part of me from my early teens into this moment. Very much drives me. If I have a podcast with an interesting guest, I want as many people as possible to hear about it. And that's what drives me. I do also care about money and finances and some people who don't and they're really driven by, and I believe that most people are driven by one thing. So if I had to choose one, I would say fame. But the outcome of it, of doing it well has been a little bit of the others.

And so how did you evolve into the position, your first serious business position, how did that.

Well, I think again you talk about personalities and Personas. I created it. I just created it. I was writing for a very large national teen magazine, the glossy classic teen magazine magazine. The owner went a bit sideways or the publisher went a bit sideways. I felt like I can't be unemployed at the age of 19. This is too much fun. I mean I'm, my friends are, my friends are buying concert tickets and I'm backstage, right? This is like, this is fun. You don't want to mess that up. They're buying concert tickets and tapes and CDs and albums and I'm getting them for free from the record company. This is great. And I realized very early that Dan Sullivan, the strategic coach, talks about this in terms of allowance, right? I was relying on this publisher for my allowance. Hey publisher, I wrote this article, can I have some money? When I realized once you really transform and think about being an entrepreneur, meaning I am now taking full responsibility for what's going to happen to me on any of those levers. Power, fame, money, whatever it's going to be, that was really transformative for me and I decided I'm going to set my own course and I'm going to live and die by the success that that generates. Now, again, being older, it's not self made, it's not alone. There's partners and family and community and individuals that take chances on you and give you opportunities. But I realized very quickly because future in life, you know, from the moment I did take jobs where I was an employee on a salary and it just, it never stuck. It never clicked with me because I kept just going back to this idea that I want to have. I wanted my potential to be more unlimited. Not that you can't find an unlimited potential in an organization. Most people can. I couldn't. I wasn't finding that. So it's just that, that entrepreneurship, that feeling I can do my own thing and do it better as long as I have the right people surrounding me, that that was the major catalyst in all of this. I didn't want to ask anybody for the allowance.

When did you come. These are realizations that you have to be at a certain level down the road before the light bulb goes on. And usually it's in jobs where you're working, following decisions people are making that are not that sharp and you say.

Wait a minute, there's a better way.

There'S a better way, and this is not going to work. I'm not excited about going down this, wasting my time on this project. It's not my call, you know. And so you want to get to where you're, you're calling the shot. And how did you get. Let's, let's just back it up a little bit. How did you get to this point where you're writing for teen magazines at 19 years old? I mean, a little history in there too.

Yeah, there's always history in stories, for sure. I mean, this is going to sound capitalistic or very money driven and it's not. But I can't. I remember being very young and thinking that I wanted to be a millionaire by the time I was 18, which I did not. That goal did not happen. So we talk about like, what is it in you? And I don't, like, I don't know that I could even tell you at nine or eight years old what a million dollars meant. Or I think that what it meant was I wanted freedom and choice, but that was the framework I used. So, you know, when my friends. By 18, I wanted to be a millionaire by the time I was 18. That's what I was. It didn't happen, not even by a long shot. It happened way late.

It's kind of a ballsy thing for.

A kid, especially when you're 10 years old.

Yeah, especially if we're in Canada, you know.

Good lord. Well, lots of opportunities up here.

I've got to bust your balls a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. But you know what part of the analogy of why I went into publishing my own magazines. And the strategy that we deployed with me and my business partner was it was very much aligned with what you're saying. We wanted to be a big fish in a small pond. It was much easier for us to do that. So that's another strategy we can talk about a little bit later. But getting back to the magazine. So I had always taken on work, whether it was again at the time delivering newspapers when I was very young, to then working in a magazine store when I was very, very young. I always held these jobs, frozen yogurt, retail, you name it. And at the time, this was at the early days of CDs being released in music. For those who are old enough to remember, I am. They were really expensive when they first came out, Larry, I don't know if you remember, but they were 40, 50 bucks for one album is crazy. And there was a local individual, I don't even know how I met them, who basically decided that they were going to set up the blockbuster of renting music, not necessarily realizing that the copyright on that is very different from video rentals and you can't do that. So I had been, this was great. You pay a couple bucks, you take the CD home, you copy it for yourself. Life is great. You listen to it and then you have a copy of it. And in very early days of this technology, now because of the home I grew up in, we came from an average middle class family, four boys. And my parents would always give us one gift that we could share, hoping that we both get along. And also it was very easy way to save money. So they would buy us things like Pong and Atari. And then when the computers, those first computers came out, they bought us one of those. And I offered this person that I would basically database or catalog their whole collection. And again, we're not talking about sophisticated database, we're talking about word processing. Just do it so they could see what they have in the store and if it's in, if it's out, and if the deal was, you know, pay me a couple bucks or I'll just grab whatever CDs I want at the end of the day. And we did a deal like that. Eventually, you know, the person caught a cold and said, can you help me out of the store? And I'd help out a little bit there. This person went on to meet someone else who was involved in this magazine. And because of my role, this person didn't know how to type. And so they had said, can you Just type these articles that I'll read to you that they would longhand write. And so we did that for a while and I had a lot of fun doing this. We got free tickets and free music stuff. It was great. And as a thank you, they invited me to go with them to Toronto. They were interviewing an artist or going to see some artists, I don't remember. And on the road on the way there, they had one of the earlier mobile phones, got a call that Tommy Lee from Motley Crue was in town. And person looked over and said, you know, why don't you take a run at doing the interview? So I wrote the. I did the interview, said, why don't you write up the article? I wrote it up. And the person submitted as their own work. I was totally fine with this. It was just a great experience. But the editor recognized that it wasn't really their work. And that's when I was introduced. And the publisher at the time was really cool. They basically said, what would be greater than a teen magazine, having a teenager write for them? And so I got. I got this gig. So I had all these intersections happening. There really is a moment where you luck out. You're in the right place, right time, but you take advantage of the situation. You demonstrate your skills. But it's a culmination of me being really passionate about music, me having a high knowledge base, me enjoying writing and reading, me having the skills on the computer. And what's most fascinating is that my friends who I had from the music industry for many decades, and when I switched over to marketing and media, they were always shocked at this. Like, how did you do this? I'm like, it was all there. I mean, it's all there. When you look back, it seems weird when it's moving forward, but when you look back, a lot of these skills and competencies and passions seem very obvious to where it is today. And I try to keep the flames on all of those a bit hot. I like running them a bit hot. So I'm not somebody who rests on the fact that Motley Crue was really popular in the late 80s. I want to know who's popular now. I want to go back and listen to other genres. And I believe that that exploration and my passion of music leads me to create better work, much in the same way as technology. The more technologies I expose myself to and don't close my mind off to, the more opportunities have been about. So while everyone sits here panicking about what's happening in the stock market and what's happening with NFTs and crypto. I'm very open to experimenting and trying different things, whether it's physically investing in it and or just being tangentially involved in it, because I've seen enough to know that none of us really know. But if you don't get there early, you can get old really fast. Right.

You know, couple of things. First of all, speaks to from the beginning the importance of pursuing the things that you're naturally curious and excited about, because that's when you're willing to take. You had the phrase always grabbed every job that was out there. And if that's going in the direction you have an interest in, an enthusiasm for, a curiosity about, you don't mind doing those jobs. Like Simon Cowell started out, he knew he wanted to be a producer, he wanted to get a television, this, that. And there was one main guy, I forget his name right now, one main guy, legendary in town. Well, Simon, the young kid coming up, he worked his way into where he got in the room and he. First thing he did was he would go get the coffee. He didn't have a job, but he was the guy who got the coffee for the longest time. But then you move up from there and so you don't do those things. You're not willing to do those things and to work as hard as you need to work, because if it's something you enjoy, you're curious, you're fascinated by it, it doesn't seem work to you like it would be to somebody who really is not passionate about it, don't you think?

I think it's part of it. I think the other aspect that I don't see as much these days is willing to go long and go deep, even when it's not right. And what I mean by that is, over the course of running the agency, we had literally thousands of employees that cycled in and out. And as we grew and changed, I'd often be happy to go for coffee or lunch with them. I believe that as much as you have mentors who may be authors who are dead or senior people, everybody should have a mentor who is just out of university showing you what's what and what's new and what's exciting is a very important thing. And I always, really always enjoy being around that spirit that, you know, that moment in time where you can take risks. I love that, that time of people's lives. And when I have these conversations, it was always, well, you know, I can get paid $20,000 more, get a higher job, salary and go over there and do this. And these people would cycle like that. They might have the job title and they might have the salary, but they never went deep or long in anything. And it eventually catches up to you. And so the only difference that I would add on to that is I kept a lot of jobs that weren't for me in industries that I didn't love for a long time. And I went deep on those jobs because it's almost like I wanted to make sure it wasn't. Either it wasn't for me or I had done my best to go through it. Because it's easy to have success once you're in it. It's very hard to keep coming back when it's not something you love or you're making mistakes or you don't know everything you think you know about it. And because I was willing to go through, you know, what maybe some people call the grind, I don't know if that's true or not. That's just my personality. And I do believe that in the end, while it might have taken longer and have been a harder road, it made me better in everything. Every job that I quit to start something new, and I didn't have that many of them or ventures too. I feel like I did everything I could, meaning there was nothing left. And again, when you run an agency, client problems. I mean, all you're doing is solving problems all day and night. And I think there's a real value in being able to build a relationship and come back when things go really, really south. Not to quit and not to just move on. And I always felt that maybe to my detriment and some of my partners might even argue that that was maybe part of my issues. I always wanted it to at least try to. If you're going to go dipping really low, try to come back the best you can. That's where I think learning really happens, that moment where it's. You're really in it and it doesn't look good and you're trying, you know, we were lucky. Great timing, great. You know, everyone's looking to build a website, everyone's looking at social. Everyone. Very fortuitous and very lucky. But there were a lot of challenges and a lot of convincing and a lot of changing of the guards. And I feel that going through that was more learning and driving than just looking at the. At the. At the mountaintops, if you will. Right.

Absolutely.

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