[Greatest Hits] Episode #14: From Quitter to Winner with Millionaire Ian Prukner

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 inside sound ready. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

All right, want a treat? We've got my great friend Ian Prockner back today. And I wanted Ian to come back and talk about something that really intrigued me the first time he was on and he was talking about. We were talking about having a direction in life and beginning. You're launching out into the new year and the new jobs and the new adventures with a clear sense of what you wanted to get out of it, what your purpose was. And Ian, when he started out in his life, the only thing he was really good at was starting and quitting, more or less. And he said, I quit this, I quit that. And I don't think you really shared the fact that you were a musician and were in bands and everything that much, but you mentioned that kind of in passing. But I wanted to get you back on Ian to follow up on that, because that's really what a lot of people got to learn. They've got to learn how to speak, stop quitting and start staying on track. Because if you're quitting all the time, you're always starting over. At some point, you don't want to start over, you want to move forward. And so would you mind getting and following up on that? Like, how did you go from that stage, your life, where you're always quitting everything, to where now I'm going to lock in and I'm going to face the challenges rather than run from the challenges.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that that is paramount to anybody that's going to win big in anything. I was that guy Larry, that was the jack of all trades, but the master of none. Like, I would do things I enjoyed and I would get good at them because I enjoyed it. But as soon as it became work, as soon as I kind of hit that plateau of natural ability and I had to start grinding through, I had to start really practicing to move forward. I would just get distracted and try to move on to some other thing in my life that I could be immediately good at. Until that got hard, and then I just did it over and over and over again, thing to thing to thing, because I really didn't want to face the music of having to push through the discomfort of not being great at something immediately.

Right.

Like, we all think we should be superstars at something or it's not meant to be. And ultimately, what had to happen, Larry, the shift that changed in my life and the shift that will happen in everybody's life that goes from a serial quitter to a serial winner, right? Which, by the way, is great book that you wrote that changed my life in a lot of ways. Okay? But how you do that is you learn how to get yourself to do that which you don't want to do, but must do to move forward. And that's where the rubber meets the road. Like I talked about on the first call, the biggest gap in the world is the gap between knowing what to do and doing those things. And what I had to do is I had to understand and work a mechanism in my life that when I was faced with a challenge, when I was faced with something I wasn't good at but needed to get good at, that instead of quitting, I could find the levers in myself to motivate me to keep moving. Because eventually, if you keep getting better, your obstacle in that area disappears or at least shrinks back to manageable. And that's what most people fail to connect the dots on. They think, well, I'm just not good at this. They view themselves in kind of a fixed operating system. That's not my talent. That's not where my degree is. I've never done something, and therefore I'll never be good at it. But that's just not true. We're human beings. We can learn just about anything with enough time and effort and energy. And so I had to change that mindset. That said, no, listen, if I'm not good enough at something right now, with enough time and effort and practice at that, I can at least improve it, right? So I had to have that belief, number one. And then I just needed to learn me. I needed to learn me. And the truth is, most of us walking around out there have very little idea of what motivates us, why, and how to bring up that motivation on demand. As I mentioned just briefly, these three sorts of motivation. There's really three levels of motivation that exists in the world for each and every person. Level one is material, right? And that's like your food, your gas, your clothes, your house, your insurances, what you need to live. And material. Motivation is really the shallowest form of motivation, Larry. Not shallow like something's wrong with it or we shouldn't want that, but shallow in the terms of once you have that need met, that need ceases to motivate you any further because you've got it. Once you have that new car you wanted. You don't work to get that new car any longer. You have it, right? So there's material motivation. Much more powerful than material motivation is respect and recognition. This is motivation that keeps on going, right? So. So one of my mentors early on in my career, somebody I look up to in an unbelievable way, when I started making real money, he brought me up on a stage. He said, look at you making all this money, right? And I'm thinking, boy, he's seen my hard work. It's incredible. He says, you know, I've seen a thousand people like you. You probably won't be here next year. And I was like, what can you believe? It's so embarrassing, Larry. But what he was doing is he knew that I had a deep desire to have his respect because I respected him so much. I wanted to be like him when I grew up, right? Okay. And so he understood. And Larry, first, for years, every time I didn't feel like making another phone call, every time I had a bad day out in the field, I would think about that conversation and I'd pick up the phone, I'd make one more call, no matter how bad I didn't want to do it. Worse than not wanting to do that thing, I did not want to not have that men's respect. And so respect and recognition is a very powerful motivator because even after we start winning, even after we start succeeding, we don't want to lose that respect and recognition. We don't want to be a one hit wonder. We want to manage that respect and recognition. And the truth is, Larry, everybody's motivated by respect and recognition. The problem is most people are motivated by the wrong people's respect and recognition, right? They want respect and recognition to fit in with the people who are where they are currently in life instead of the people who are where they want to be in their life, right? And so the third level, even more powerful than those two, is legacy. Like, what's this all going to mean when I'm gone? What is the shadow of my life going to look like on the planet Earth? What will people say about me? Why did my life matter? And see, even after the cars and the houses and the big incomes and the trophies and all the accolades and the awards, that what is my life going to mean 200 years from now? Who's going to remember my name? That is a motivator that keeps even the ultra. Look at somebody like Elon Musk, right? Multi, multi billionaire, okay, has the respect and recognition of hundreds of millions of people around the globe. But yet he's still after. He's still going to a new level. He's not doing it for the material motivation. He's got all that. He's really not doing it so that more people will know who he is or respect him any further. He's got all that. He's doing it because he wants his life to mean something to the planet 500 years from now, right? And so we've got kind of these three levels of motivation happening all the time in our lives, but most of us aren't even aware of it. I wasn't aware of it. I wasn't aware that it existed, and I sure wasn't aware of how to use it. But once I understood those three things, right, I was able to start getting myself to do Larry, that which previously I was unwilling to do, right? Because instead of not being motivated, I learned how to push the buttons. I learned how to push the buttons. And so, Larry, there's two sorts of people. There's stick people and carrot people. Stick people are people who move to avoid pain, right? They'll run into action. This is the person who's let their marriage disintegrate and all of a sudden it blows up and divorce comes out in the conversation. And now they're like, ready to change. They're reading marriage books, they're going to counseling, they're spending. It's like a wake up call. Oh, I don't want that. Let's change, right? They move to avoid pain. And then there are carrot people. Carrot people are people who move for the pursuit of pleasure, right? Something they can gain, something they want. And here's the deal, Larry. Here's what I love about this. There's no right or wrong in winning in business. Carrot people win in business. Thick people win in business. The key is you need to know which you are, what your people are, and then have a plan that's like, let me give you a great example. Let me give you a great example. So if you are a stick person with material motivation, okay? This is a great tool that somebody taught me early on that I used, because I have a little bit of this in me. And so here's what happens, right? Okay. You don't go to work until you have to go to work, right? Until that mortgage payment's about due and they're not enough. But then all of a sudden, you're like, superstar Larry, you ever seen somebody just come out of the woodwork and just go crush a competition? The last two or three days, they had the Capability to play like that the entire time. But they weren't because they hadn't tapped into that motivation, right? Okay, so here's what we do. What I do, what I teach my people to do from a business perspective, if you're a stick person and you want to motivate yourself, materially set up $1,000 a month auto draft into an investment account, whatever day of the month you want. But right now you're comfortable. So you're not going to work, but you know that things coming. And Larry, one or two things going to happen. You're going to go to work to make that money, to make sure that money's in that account and auto draft you or that things going to overdraft you, right? And you're going to move and make sure that never happens again. Now, you'll do that by shutting it off, right? So you don't have to feel the pain or by learning, like, no, I'm going to grow and I'm going to work, but either way you move. Either way you move. Now, what if you're a carrot person with material motivation? What I always did, Larry, is I'm a watch nut. I love watches. And I would put a watch goal at a certain income level, and even though I could go buy that watch with the income I was making, I wouldn't buy. I refused until I hit that next level. And so every day when I had a chance to go home, call it quits, or just push a little bit further, I thought about that thing that I wanted, right? And I set up strategically these rewards along the way that trick me into producing, into motivating myself. Right. Does that make sense to you? So you could kind of do this once you realize, hey, am I a stick person, a carrot person? You could do that at all three levels. You could create three, four, five things that'll get you to move, and then you just press the buttons. And Larry, man, listen, you learn how to press your own buttons. You don't need set somebody to do it for you. You don't need an external force to do it for you. You become undoubted gum stoppable. I mean, the power of a human being that can get themselves to do what they don't necessarily want to, but need to do at the flick of a wrist. I mean, that is unbelievable power right there. And that's what I learned. That's what I learned. I learned how to do. Ian, how do you do the thing you know you need to do but you don't want to do? And you're probably not going to without this. I learned these things about myself, put them in place. It caused me to go from making eighteen hundred and fifty dollars a month to one hundred thousand dollars a month plus. Right. How did I do that? I did it in this way. I learned these processes that exist out there. We're just not thinking about them. We're not thinking about them, we're not learning about them. We're not applying them to our life. We're just saying things like, I'm not motivated. That's untrue. Everybody's motivated. They're just not sure how to motivate themselves.

Well, the thing is, Ian, learning is. Winning is a learned skill, and you learn techniques. One of the great things that happened to me, I don't know where this came exactly came in, was that, actually.

I do remember it was a book.

But called Ideas are a Dime a Dozen. But the people who use them are priceless, and great ideas do not care who use them. And so if people are beating, I always operated this way. If somebody was beating me, Ian, I didn't look at it as they were better than me. I just looked at it as they knew something I did not know. And if I could pick their brain and find out what it is, they knew how to say, they knew how to think through a situation the that I did not know. I could use those same strategies, just like winning in chess, you can use the same strategies as a chess grandmaster and start to have a little bit more success on the chessboard than you would on your own.

Absolutely.

Out there, if you really want to get ahead. And I'll tell you, don't get hung up. Am I this kind of person or that kind of person? To me, we're all the same. We're all those kind of people at different times in our life, at different areas of our life where we're this way or that way, we're all combinations of all of these things. And so just the thing is, we all are faced with a challenge of how can I get myself to work, how can I get myself not to quit, how can I get myself to perform? At peak, I may not be that great, but I do have a maximum level. And the more I can get myself to perform in that maximum level, the more I'm going to get out of life and the more satisfied, the more fulfilled, the more enjoyment I'm going to have and the more of a difference I'm going to make. And so I don't. I don't need to worry about how good am I compared to somebody else or whatever? The idea is like, how good can I be and how can I get myself up to that point? And we can all drive ourselves consistently to a higher level than we can if someone is just threatening us or giving us lollipops every time we do something. And so that carrot stick motivation works and you don't have to trust somebody else to do it for you. That's what Ian's telling you. You can use it for yourself. Ian, this has been great. We're going to do it again and.

I'm going to get you to help.

Me out on some of these podcasts going forward because this is fun, man. It's fun.

I love it. Great time. It's an absolute blast. And I know people are getting a lot of value.

Yeah. And of course you and I are not perfect either. We need to freshen ourselves up from time to time, like every day. So this has been good for me. I hope it's been good for you. If people want, I know you have a way of offering some free follow up information for people that have gotten fired up about listening to this. You want to pass it on to them?

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, listen guys, two ways you can get some more information here. Number one is follow me on social media, ianpruckner, on Instagram, on Facebook. The second thing you can do, if you can text the word growth, G R O W T H growth text the word growth to 484848. So you text growth to 484848 and I'm actually going to send you the in depth training I do on the three levels of motivation, the two types of people, so you can learn exactly who you are, where you fit into this and have the strategies, the tools that you need to be able to do what Larry saying, take the action. If you do what others are doing, you can have the results totally free of charge. We're going to get you that lesson out. I hope you get a lot of value out of it. And then once you've gone through it, tag me in social media, let me know your favorite parts, what you got out of it. And it's our gift to you for listening today. So again, you just text GROWTH to 484848 and we'll send that on out to you. Larry, it's been a pleasure as always and man, I'm excited to get even bigger with you and help people listening to this realize their goals and dreams.

Absolutely, Ian, thank you for getting on. And one thing we'll both tell you, everybody, the world needs more winners. Don't apologize about wanting to win and make the biggest impact possible out of your life. And so let's go have some fun. Thank you Ian. Goodbye.

Thanks Larry. See you later.

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