Big Leaps of Big Money: The Mindset of Wealth

Immediately, as soon as it started going up again, I got caught up in the woulda, shoulda, coulda, oh no, look, today it's worth 1.2. I created a month or two of.

Misery for myself and I lost half of my principal because I didn't have the discipline.

The one thing that, looking back over my whole career I wish I'd invested more in were personal transformation things at the time or things that I thought I couldn't afford. To me, the big thing to invest in is your genius. Hi everybody. I want you to listen and watch this episode of the Big Leap podcast because it's about big money leaps. And you'll hear a lot of personal stories from me and Mike, including some of our colossal mistakes, as well as a few big wins. But what you'll really do is get underneath and understand how the mechanisms work that you need to take care of in order to increase your wealth in an elegant, easeful way.

Yeah, I think what I was able to learn in listening to Gay and what I was able to reflect is I've been spending time with my 21 year old son and I got to have the conversation. If I would have known then at your age what I know now, here's what I would have done. And we walk away with a five step process and system which is the mindsets of wealth creation, as well as some really practical, tactical ways on how to get access to unfair advantage offers and investment opportunities that might not be obvious or they're simply not available to anyone else. So all that and a lot more in this episode of the Big Leap. Big Money Leaps.

Hi everybody, this is Gay Hendricks. And welcome to this episode of the Big Leap podcast where we're going to talk about a subject that not only Mike and I are fascinated by, but I bet you will be too, because it's some new ways of looking and some old ways of looking at investments and what you need to invest in as a coach or a therapist or an entrepreneur, how to make your investments really work for you.

So big money, big leaps or big leaps of big money is the big idea. And when Gay and I were talking about doing this episode, what we really want to do is give you some of our shortcuts. So we're going to talk about genuine, real investments. We've made some of our biggest regrets, but also the mindsets that we've learned, including Gay's perspective because he's been investing longer than me. Some of my biggest, I'd say dumb mistakes, also my biggest success, but also conversations I've been having with my son Zach, who's 21. And where his mindsets are, they're not even really about money right now. But I've really seen a pattern that if he gets past these mental gymnastics and hurdles that he has in his present day life, they're going to be reflected in the wealth he creates as well. And in a way, this is about the mindset of wealth that if you make these mental mistakes, they're gonna haunt you for the rest of your life. So how's that for a big promise? Gay. Yay.

That's really big. Well, speaking of big, my first big leap in the world of investing came when I was just out of high school, and I was fascinated by the stock market. And I was fascinated by it from the moment I heard about it. I just thought it was the coolest idea that you could make up a new thing that allowed anybody that wanted to to participate in the engine of American enterprise for just buying a couple of pieces of stock. And so that seemed to me such a cool idea that I got my job as a furniture mover the day I got out of high school. And I was going to work the summer being a furniture mover and then go to college in the fall at Rollins, where I was due to start as a freshman. And so I worked for two weeks and I got my first paycheck, and I was working for 50 cents an hour. And after two weeks, they gave me a raise to 75 cents an hour. And man, that was just hot stuff, you know, 1962, this was.

That's a 50 increase in pay. That's not bad.

And I was probably the worst furniture mover in history, though, because my first week on the job, I managed to. Me and my sidekick, we picked up a piece of an Italian marble table from both ends, and it cracked in the middle.

Oh, no.

So we had to go back to the store.

Can't fix that.

Yeah, can't fix that. And fortunately, the owner's nephew was who my sidekick was. He was working there for the summer, too. So to blow up at me would have been to blow up at a family member, which I don't think she wanted to do. Anyway, we got away with it. But here's the thing. At the end of two weeks, I got my first paycheck, and it was something like $28.72 or something like that. And I went down to the stockbroker in Leesburg, Florida. At the time, there was only one stockbroker base and company, and they were used to seeing Me, because I would go in over my lunch hour and watch the ticker tape go by. And so this day I went in there and I bought my first share. I bought one share of Avco stock. Avco, it was a financial services company and I bought it. And during the summer I wrote it up to 27 and sold that sucker. And I made $10 doing nothing. And that was to me. Oh, once I saw how that worked, you know, that the money could make the money, I became even more avidly connected to the world of stocks and that kind of thing. And so I didn't think about it too much until later on when I became a university professor because it was the first time I was generating, you know, any kind of suspense, substantial big money. But I've. I've.

There are basically three traditional ways to invest in things. You can invest in real estate and that's been huge for a lot of people, especially over the past 20 or 30 years. And I've benefited from that on a number of occasions myself. Although I must say that the terrible thing that comes along with real estate investing is woulda, shoulda, coulda. Well, it happens in the stock market too. But if you sell something like a friend of mine sold her house for $280,000 back in the 90s, somebody just bought it for $2.3 million. And there's a classic example. If she wanted to, she could play woulda, shoulda, coulda. But anyway, there's real estate, there's stock and there's bonds, and then there's a whole bunch of other stuff like your cousin's cookie company.

And your brother in law's new enterprise where he's going to have food trucks running all over Los Angeles. And these are just things that come to mind that friends of mine have invested in. I'm not making these things up, but the. So I've invested in a lot of traditional things at this stage of the game. I own a little bit of real estate, but I own a lot of stocks and bonds. But also there's a surprise punchline about the thing that I think everybody ought to be investing in that hardly anybody does. And we're going to talk about that. So continue to breathe and open up a space for us to hit you with a slam dunk punchline here in just a little while. But Mike, what's. What's been your experience with the traditional things?

Well.

When I go back, my first real foray into stocks.

Was I.

Probably would have been around.

1999, I think, because before that I was always a serial entrepreneur. And I built my companies by financing myself, really, with credit cards. Okay, So I would buy equipment or gear and that. And you use credit. And at the time, I started this digital marketing agency, and we were very dependent upon buying at the time, it was expensive video equipment. You know, to do what we do now for like a thousand bucks cost 100 grand back then. And I had lots of computers, and I'd build them myself. And I found every which way to, like, save money and do as much as I could. But we built a substantial business, we sold it, and I took some of my earnings. And at the time, let's just say I had $100,000 of liquid capital in addition to some other capital I put away. And again, knowing what I know now, my regret and mistakes were that I didn't really create genuine leverage. And I didn't think about how do I buy my time back with my money? How do I create recurring monthly income using passive mechanisms? And the truth was, I was afraid.

Of doing that because I didn't know what I didn't know.

That was a big, challenging problem. So I had gone to a Tony Robbins eventually called Wealth Mastery. And I learned a technique that. What I could do is. It was this technique where you'd put money into a certain type of a market, and it was like a foreign trade based upon a couple of indicators. And then you'd pull out at the end of the day. And there were little stock market indicators and bond market indicators to time the market based upon when the foreign exchanges were opening versus the the US Based ones. It was a swap back and forth. And it worked like crazy. It was before algorithmic stuff was happening. And I went from having like 100 grand in my account to having 180 grand in my account within, like, I don't know, we'll say 60 or 90 days. And then I forgot about it. I just quit doing it. I was focused on other things. And the next time I checked, my account was down to like, $45,000.

So I wound up with less than half of my original principal. And if I would have just kept my eye on the ball, that would have accumulated and accumulated. But that wasn't my mindset. So from that moment on, I'm like, screw the stock market. I lost money there. And then I also had this thing where I just didn't understand real estate. And my mindset was, well, if I buy a house and rent it out, I'm going to have to think about the toilets or someone's going to call me up and I never wanted to talk to a renter. So I said forget that, I'm never going to do that. And I just stuck to what I knew. If you fast forward for probably the next 25 years of my life, I'd say the majority of it. Most of my investments have been made with other entrepreneurs like me, which basically meant high risk business builders with my kind of mindset who are swinging for the fences, going for home runs. And I'd put in, you know, anywhere from 10 to 100 to probably my biggest investment in, in a VC thing would be like 250 grand. Now remember, this is my hard earned post tax money and out of literally, you know, at this point, you know, in the millions that I put into VC style deals, in 15 years worth I've had one payoff from the VC deals versus building and selling five businesses where I've gotten my biggest ROI.

Stocks. Nothing really significant, some crypto stuff. But for the most part my wealth has come from the value of my house increasing dramatically, like tripling better than triple.

And other hard things that have been completely quiet. In other words, my higher risk, personally driven investments into stocks, bonds, VCs, very little or no ROI to speak of. You know, I had a big pop like an 8x on the one that was like almost 15 years old.

But then the other ones have been like.

Things that I did long term with my wealth manager investment advisor where you know, the story I like to tell is I can remember Vivian and I were about to meet end of the year with our wealth managers and I was kind of saying, you know what, these guys aren't aggressive for me, we should be doing more aggressive things and getting better roi. And I was ready to have the talk with them about how we should change stuff. And they laid this piece of paper in front of me and on it was well over $1 million in wealth that we had created and accumulated and I didn't even know it existed. And that's when I backed off and I said, you know what.

There's certain things you're going to do really well and there's certain things that you'll never keep track of. Just like my first stock market lesson, which is I took my eyes off the ball and I lost half of my principal because I didn't have the discipline. So there's a lot of lessons to unpack there. But since then I made a lot of really smart things happen and that's more where I know we're going to be heading. So any comments Feedback or observations based upon that? Long story.

Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm sorry you had such bad luck with your VC investments. I'm on the other end of the scale. I know I've had so many great. And in fact, I want to introduce the subject of luck right now, because I think luck has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time to either hear about an investment or, you know, have somebody offer you something. But anyway, let's just acknowledge now and forever the awesome effect of luck and maybe invite our listeners and viewers to just here on the spot, open themselves up to letting themselves be luckier. Because if you talk to any successful person out there, it doesn't matter if it's Richard Branson or whoever, you know, ask them, are you a lucky guy? Yeah, one of the luckiest people I've ever met.

Yeah. So we got to make sure we tell people to watch and listen to the luck episodes because we've had a couple of them, and it's about creating conscious luck. It's. It's your book, conscious Luck. But also we've done a couple episodes on that, so that's a big one. And also in the comments, if you're watching this on YouTube, what's been your best and worst investment and money lesson? Wealth. Money investment lesson.

Yeah. And also let's bring up the subject here, since it's kind of in the background of how to get your own personal works personality separated out from your investments so that you don't take down your investments when you have a bad personality day or have a bad personality fix. Like I was, you know, Jackie Kennedy, Jackie Onassis, you know, it's kind of revered, iconic figure, but she did one of the most colossally stupid stock market mistakes in history. And let me just give you the sequence of it. She was married to Aristotle Onassis, very wealthy man. But when he was on his deathbed, I guess they were on the outs, and she didn't show up to sit next to him or hold his hand and say, hey, I'm sorry it didn't work out between whatever. She just didn't show up. And so he gave her a pittance of an inheritance when he died. $2 million, I think it was. Yeah, it was 2 million bucks. And she was really pissed off about only getting 2 million.

Bucks. And so she ended up in a lawsuit and everything like that. And then so she ended up with a settlement of $26 million. I think my numbers are pretty accurate here, but you can look all this stuff up. Then she started playing the stock market. She must have felt invincible with this $26 million. And guess how much she whittled her $26 million down to? Who?

Probably $2 million.

Yep.

Yeah, well, God bless. I mean.

We'Ve all probably done. Maybe not for that amount of money, but you get your own personal. Like she needed to get some revenge back at old Aristotle for cheating. Or she thought, well, on the other hand, she could have said, wow, I made 2 million bucks. You know, didn't even really like the guy that much, but I was married to him for a little while. And yeah, two million bucks ain't bad. But no, can't do that. You know, she spent years with this lawsuit and then lost it all in the stock market anyway. So don't be a Jackie O, whatever you are. And it can even happen. Like, I. I would have bring up woulda, shoulda, coulda again, because I had a woulda, shoulda, coulda experience. Even though I made a lot of money on something, I invested on something, invested in something back in the dot com era, which I probably would not do now because I like to invest in things now that I have some idea of how they work or what they do. You know, Like, Katie and I were one of the first five investors in Kavita, which was a probiotic drink which we later sold to Pepsi for more than 200 million. Now, that I can understand. The drink makes you feel better and all the research behind it. And so I understand it. But this first investment, this dot com thing, I was investing in a little algorithm that made email work better, which I could sort of understand. But anyway, when I cashed in, I had the opportunity on one day.

To cash in early, even before the other people got to get out for a fixed amount. And in this case, it was $850,000, and that was the fixed amount. That was $85 times 10,000 shares, which is what I own. So my stockbroker decided to do the same thing, and he counseled all of us to get out on this particular guaranteed day.

Which we did. And then we had the experience of watching it go on up to $150 a share.

Yeah.

And so instead of making $1.5 million, I was stuck with a measly 850. But I. If you're not seeing this, I'm. I'm joking about that because, uh. But what happened was the $850,000, which Katie and I high fived each other about immediately as soon as it started going up again. I got caught up in the widow shoulda, coulda. Oh, no, look, today it's worth 1.2. Oh, gee, today it's worth 1.3 million. You know, and so I created a month or two of misery for myself, which, looking back on it, I think that's the last time I did that because it was just so obvious, you know, that instead of celebrating making almost a million dollars, I was sitting around kvetching because I only made 850,000. So that taught me a big lesson about woulda, shoulda, coulda. So if you or anybody else has that tendency to do that, you know, put a priority on breaking through that pattern.

Yeah, okay, I've got a. I've got a what a coulda, shoulda for you. It's how a stupid fear and a colossal mistake cost me $10 million, which in my book is a few money. All right, so here's the setup.

So.

I bought a Tesla Roadster very early on, I was a big advocate, and I went 100% electric, went solar on my home, did a documentary, all that. And when I did that, one of the things that Tesla did is they allowed me to buy 1,000 shares of Tesla stock.

And the strike price was like 20 bucks. Okay, now just 1,000 shares at 20 bucks with splits would be worth or exceed $10 million now, okay, probably substantially more than that last time. I could do a quick piece of research. But with that in mind.

What I did, because I had this story about how I always lost money in the stock market.

As soon as it opened up, I.

Instructed. And this is another thing, I outsourced my money movement, which was a big dumb mistake. So I'm not blaming her for this. This is my fault. But I instructed my assistant to log into my brokerage account and put in a stop sell order.

Because I knew it would pop right away for $27, I think is what I said. And I figured as soon as it hits 27, I'll have made money, almost doubled, you know, or whatever, added 50%, which to me, like, I would have been happy with that at the time, you know, and at the time, 20 grand liquid, because I was doing a new business. I was a little liquid poor. I was going through a cycle.

It would have been some extra dough. I could buy some more computers with that, that I could make money with. So unfortunately, what happened is the. The order was incorrectly entered and the stock ended up selling during a bounce down for $19. So I lost a dollar a share.

And I really could have been just fine if that just would have sat out and done nothing. And on another note, while I just sort of watched this go on over time since Tesla went public, and it's just like this annoying, nagging thing where it's like, yep, yeah, imagine what that would have been. I can remember when it was at 4, and I do have a couple deals out there that do represent when they finally turn liquid, they are a few money size, you know, it's. It's a couple of them. But what did.

Bother me was just how I approached it. It was like, never outsource.

And, you know, I knew in my heart, because I loved that car, it was like this, these guys are going somewhere, and it's like Costco. I've. Until recently, I just always loved the Costco brand and Apple brand. And I buy and sell the stock. I traded it, but I, you know, if I were smart, I would have bought and held something that I loved, the product. And I think that's, you know, kind of a classic thing. You never want to get attached to a brand or attached to a stock, but when it's something you love and you know they're good and you like the business, you know, I know as soon as I lose interest in a business, usually the stock falls after that because there's, there's a reason why I quit shopping there, you know, and if you talk to people who've worked at Costco for decades, they're like, yeah, they quit listening to us. You can tell the brand's kind of been going to crap the past couple of years.

So anyway, that's.

Those are some of the big mental hurdles. And I have one other lesson that I was going to share with you about a conversation I've had with Zach. But again, I want to pass it back to you. If you have some comments or thoughts before we get into knowing what we know now, what would we do? What would we invest in? And what are the mindsets that, you know, if we wanted to increase, like, let's say you lost most of your wealth now and had to make it back, what would you do.

That, you know, would work again, even in an up market or a down market?

One thing, and here's where we're going to drop in a big punchline. Probably the one thing that.

Looking back over my whole career I wish I'd invested more in were personal transformation things at the time or things that I thought I couldn't afford that I probably could have. You know, I could have. You know, back in 1975, I remember.

I wanted to go to a particular investment seminar. And it was a thousand dollars. And I thought, my gosh, you know, a thousand dollars for sitting in a room for a day? Well, yeah, you know, they covered strategies that, according to friends of mine that were there that they later made millions off. To me, the big thing to invest in is your genius and discovering your genius and finding out more about what your personal capabilities are and how to jazz up those personal capabilities so that they're operating in an even keener way than they are today. And that's why I think that, you know, now I have a, you know, a big portfolio. I have a. I put a lot of my money in bonds just because it's a very stable kind of thing. And then I have what I call my fun box. I have my bread box, which is 90% of my investments that are in, you know, solid kinds of things that may go up, may go down, but they're very solid in and out kind of things that I could cash out of today if I wanted. But I also have my fun box, which is 10% of my money is in stuff like.

Oh, gosh. Well, I mentioned the probiotic beverage thing, but like, I'm invested in Maxi Simons cannabis education company. And it's the number one company that goes around.

Doing educational things with cannabis. And, you know, I don't have any one way or the other, I don't care about cannabis. But it's the fact that they're taking something brand new and, and explaining it to the world for the first time. It hasn't been done very often, you know, and so Maxi was out there with the first company that did it. And so I bought a good sized piece of that. And we don't know how that's going to go yet because it's still building. A lot of these things I've learned now you have to kind of set it and forget it, you know, not take the profits away every time you get a few bucks ahead. Just kind of breathe through that and come back. But anyway, I want to just make our central point here, which is.

Just bluntly ask yourself this very moment, this very day, this very hour, to what extent are you invested in financially as well as heartfelt commitment, in your genius? And how much have you put money into doing things that support that genius? And so I'm a big cheerleader, obviously, for you finding your genius. I'm a super big cheerleader for you. Following that up with systematic addition of resources, money, whatever you can do to invest in yourself and your network and.

Enlarging your territory, so to speak. It doesn't need to be physical real estate territory, but just your sphere of influence. What can I invest in that would do that? And I've invested. I could run the number for you probably if I had a day or two. But it's got to be in the millions. Now over the past 50 years of money that I've put into learning seminars, going around the world to study with somebody for three days, you know, there's anything I could get my hands on that, that I felt like gave me some kind of a edge or a deeper sense of knowledge about myself. Because it's that also. It's that ability to get yourself out of the way and not have your personality quirks. You know, Jackie O, she was born into a wealthy family, she had wealth all her life and everything like that. But she obviously had some kind of a greed mechanism or fear mechanism that was causing her to clench up and say, sorry, $2 million isn't enough. I got to go back and get 26 and then lose it. Yeah, it's getting those personal quirks out of the way where a lot of my money has been spent.

Yes, I'm going to echo that and I'm going to give you my step by step with a learning lesson. I promised I was going to tell the Zach story. Okay, so. And mine is very, very similar to yours. So the first one is network and connections. My biggest ROIs have been in getting coached. And I, I proudly say I invest around $250,000 a year even now to belong to high end masterminds and groups where because I've been there a long time, I have a lot of trust, a lot of personal association with the founders, and I can speak there pretty much anytime I want. I get called out in these groups and you know, someone who gets used to you, they see you over a decade or so, they immediately have trust. And when you have association with the founder of an organization, there's that trust factor there. So I get really big opportunities and big investments in my coaching in them. But, you know, doing what we call our superpower accelerator, the Vision Day, you know, it's $150,000 to $250,000 investment to work with me and my team. And it's because I've invested starting a long time ago. And then next up, I put the priority there on being coachable, which is essentially what you said. You know, it's getting out of your own way and being a good listener and knowing when you're being Able to receive good advice.

And one thing that I've noticed.

Anytime you go through a major transformation, what's really happening is you're taking on a new identity. What I'd say is upgrading your operating system, and that ultimately is your personal brand. And having a strong personal brand, where you're seen as an authority or an expert, means the connections and relationships that show up give you an unfair advantage. And for example, I got called, pretty much a cold call from someone. I ended up investing in the business.

And I'm now on the board. So the owner, founder, who had been in the healthcare, and I can just say who it is. It's Soltec Health is the name of the company. This company has a sleep device. It's like a watch that listens to and pays attention to all your sleep patterns. It's like a sleep study that you get every night with a device that sits under your bed that helps you fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and get more delta sleep. And with, as an, you know, a board member, I got access to more stock at a better deal and then some payoffs. Right?

And then the other one is I got a call 48 hours ago, and I won't mention this particular brand, but it's a company I invested in a long time ago, and I just got asked to be on the board of that brand. And if it weren't for the fact that I'd been heavily invested in the relationship, in the company, and in the network that this relationship came from, that would have never happened. And there are players on this board, people who I know I'll get more access to deals. Like the best deals are the ones you'll never hear about and usually are private, and they're reserved for friends and family. You have to be a no hassle, no aggravation investor. They don't have time to chase people down and listen to a whiner complainer. No one who's doing private money wants a bitch and a nag and a pain in the ass, okay? And so you gotta be good money. You know, just because you can write a check doesn't mean you're good money.

And, you know, the biggest deals that are ever out there are the ones that are reserved for insiders. And I'm not talking about insider trading. It's just like someone will say, all we need is $5 million or all we need is 10 million. And, you know, a small chunk of that can go a long way if that thing gets acquired or ends up going public, as you've found Multiple times. Because I think part of your big wealth has come from those kinds of things. Exactly.

Yes, they've. Yeah. Well, I've.

I figured this out one time, and I can't remember the exact numbers, but I've made a lot more money from those kinds of deals than I did from book royalties. Book World. Oh, yeah, great. That was my first source of big wealth in my life. Thank you, Oprah.

And.

But the really big stuff has come from, like, one of my neighbors up the Hill calls me 10 years ago and said, I'm putting together a company and I know you've made money doing other things. Would you like to put some money in this one? And I did and ended up great.

And everybody came out very, very well. I want to speak also to that issue that you mentioned, though, about having sometimes you get into business with somebody that's obnoxious or a squeaky wheel or takes up a lot more energy. On two occasions, I've actually bought people out. Those type of people bought them out of what I was doing and just wrote him a check to get rid of them. And to me, that's good money spent because if you don't have to think about that kind of thing, it enables your mind to come up with new solutions if you're not always tripping over, oh, but I got to explain that to Bob or, oh, geez, I got to explain that to this other person.

That's right.

Yeah. So another big punchline I'm going to drop into the mix here that nobody ever told me when I was coming up was be willing to spend money to tidy up situations that are untidy if it's possible to tidy them up by buying a person out or making something stop or, you know, something being willing to actually just go, boom, that's it, over and out.

That is genius. That is. It's sort of like aggravation elimination for yourself and other people.

Because that is aggravation and resentment are really expensive emotions.

Yeah.

Spiritually unaffordable.

Yeah. And they come along with the territory a lot of times because.

Hiring mistakes, mistakes in hiring, oh, man, do they eat up a tremendous amount of energy. It took me half my life to figure this out, but at one point I figured out, okay, if it weren't for the agro factor, you know, this would be a paradise of a business to be in the. The one I was in that I had to buy the person out. And so I figured, okay, I think it cost me the first time something like $135,000 to buy the person out and have them just disappear from my life. But now, looking back on it, that seems like chump change for I got out of it because I ended up, you know, selling the business later for $10 million without that squeaky wheel there for the whole time. So another punchline that Katie and I have invested is pay attention to the very beginnings of a relationship. Because what we say is, little trouble in the beginning, big trouble later on. We had a person. This is a really strange one, but many years ago, we had a person come here who wanted us to invest in a particular thing. And.

When he walked in the door, we. We had this beautiful Persian cat named Lucy. And he was. He came in the door and Lucy was sitting there, and he made kind of a quick grab. And. Which is not the way you want to go for a cat, you know, to kind of pick her up. And she ran away. And anyway, she wouldn't even come into the room with him. And so after he left, I said, I think we just got some investment advice from our cat Lucy. You know, and as soon as Katie, we realized, wait a minute, we don't want to do business with somebody that doesn't treat our house or our cat or our lifestyle respectfully. And so we started paying attention to the initial beginnings of a relationship that help us separate ourselves out from things that can be trouble later.

That I'm gonna. I'm gonna plus one that. Which is I've heard before. You know, other people say something along the lines, if my animals don't like you, then I don't like you. But it's also one of my filters. Now for anyone I do business with is the first and foremost is no a holes, the second is no aggravation, and the third is, my wife needs to like you. Because I get. I really invest a lot of time with the people I work with. And we, we have not only business relationships, friend, I, I blur the lines, okay? And I don't. I'm not ashamed to say that because I've always been that way. Like, I play with the people I work with and I, I need to really like them because the act of creating with someone is a very intimate experience. And if there's something that annoys you now, it's going to be.

Ten times worse as soon as you're working together. Like, it's sort of like bad spouse or partner relationships. It's like that one thing they do is going to be 10 or 100 times worse.

And post coitus. That's when you really Notice it, You know, it'll be like, It'll even be 10 times worse after that. I'll be like, ugh, I put up with that for intimacy. And I think money is the same way. You know, it's like, it's not just the money, it's the type of money. So the plus that I'm gonna. The other plus I promised was this Zach story. So here's, here's what's happening. Zach just turned 21 and he's really trying to figure out his stuff. And yesterday we went out for a long walk and which to me is a treat because it's hard to just pin him down. First of all, you know, he's always got a, well, I've got something I think I'm going to do with my friends and of course nothing will happen. But for now, that always is more attractive. So getting his attention and being able to have him in a place where he's ready for some advice because oftentimes I have, my agenda is I have some observations. I want to make it better for him, I want to make it better for us. And you know, when he's been with us for the summer, keeping the, keeping the peace is always in my best interest, right? So I, I work as an ambassador and a diplomat in most of my relationships, even with my kids. So here's what happened. We're walking and.

I just wanted to communicate to him because he's been doing some work for me. But he's not always disciplined, doesn't get things done when he says he is or just, you know, gets distracted or whatever other kind of 21 year old boy, things show up. But I just told him that.

You know, playing the long game is always going to serve you the best. And it's easy. I remember when I was his age, I was always looking for what's the easy way out, what's the one thing that can make all my pain go away. And for him, some of his pains are.

A relationship, a consistent relationship with a girl. And he just had his heart broken recently.

Another one will be a consistent source of income that he's motivated by. Right? So for him, being motivated is really important. You know, he doesn't just do anything for the money, he doesn't care about money that much. Part of that is he hasn't lived in enough lack or fear, in my opinion. And then the third is.

I just say his body. Investing time in his body and seeing the relationship when his brain isn't performing or he can't stay focused, it's like, get your ass up and start moving, get inside your body. Just like you're going to naturally have fatigue and recognizing that fatigue. And I, I was just explaining to him that if I would have done when I then what I know now, I just would have chipped away at it and been more disciplined. Because if it were just 10 or 15% of my income, that no matter what kind of pain I'd have to endure for not being able to spend it now, if I just would have compounded it starting at 21 on, I would have been a multimillionaire a lot sooner and would have had a lot more peace of mind and again, focused on creating passive income and buying my time back. Because, you know, I sat down with him one day, I said, what is your price of freedom? You know, what would that take? And.

And we came up with a number and I said, you know, I can help you get to that number so you never have to think about money ever again and you'll never be someone else's slave. You'll always have control of your time. And so I think again that, that, that is the proper wealth mentality over and above the investment advice. Even though I still want to kind of complete on if you had to start all over today, what would you do? But first, any comments or thoughts on that last string of stuff?

Yes. Well, I bet a lot of us, including myself, have had family members that we kind of created a special category for. And like, for example, if you had another, if you had an employee to whom you'd given the tasks that you gave Zachary this summer, would you have fired the employee by now?

Oh, yeah, of course.

Yeah.

And so no doubt about it, I mean, it's, it's, you know, we've, we've been in the position of wanting to fire our own son many, many, many times. You know, that's the God honest truth. Right. And we're, we're gluttons for our own punishment. You know, we, we break our own rules with our family all the time.

Yeah, well, there's a good place to start, you know, just fixing those places and they're not easy to fix because I've had to fire, let's see, a niece one time and I fired my daughter a couple of times and let's see, probably some others too, that I'm not thinking of. But the.

The thing is closest to home, oftentimes you'll find the crux of the patterns that are also giving you f out there in the rest of your life too. And so that would be a good starting place. But as far as the Zach story goes.

What do you see as the next step here? Do you. Have you envisioned the next step or he.

With. With. With Zach specifically?

Yeah.

Yeah. So right now.

One of the things is getting him guidance, coaching, and support.

That doesn't involve me, which we've actually done. We. We've hired someone who's coaching him right now, but I think that's going to turn into.

Something even more intense very soon.

And I. I can't broadcast this, but I'll just say he's going to be in a position where he's going to get more in depth support beyond what we do.

That. That I'll. I'll say. And the second is.

We'Re doing something interesting. I taught him how to do something and he's excited about it, he's motivated to do it, and he has to hit a deadline in order to be rewarded. So basically, here's what it is. We're using AI to do audiobooks. So we built a little tool that you can feed an entire book into a system, and it will create an audiobook that uses your voice, and it does it very quickly. It still needs to be edited, it still needs to be submitted. But if you've done an audiobook before, you know what a giant pain in the ass it is. It's days of hell, three days of.

Sitting in a sweaty little booth.

It sucks. And it requires a lot of post production, a lot of editing. There's quality control. And the beauty of feeding it into an AI is I only need about 10 minutes of your voice to train this thing, and then it feeds into the system. Now, it still has to be edited and quality controlled, but it can be done very, very quickly. And I have enough people in my network who never want to go into another sweaty, stinky, hot booth for three days. And the AI is pretty close to indiscernible.

Now.

Sign me up as a customer because I've got about three books now that I'm way behind on doing the audiobook for.

Oh, well, we can totally do it. And I could literally take your voice from our podcast and feed it into this along with a manuscript and send you a sample, and you'll be like, holy cow. So basically, it can create a little business for him.

Where he can live on his own and be independent and either continue to go to school or not. The truth is, right now he could use a break for a year just to catch up to his brain and, you know, his whole. His Whole generation's still traumatized by.

The lockdown. And you know, I can't tell you how many kids his age are really just broken right now. And.

I think finding that purpose, creating that motivation and a sense of service and creating independence. So the answer to your question is all of those things. But I think it took that story. But at least he's feeling some hope right now. And he does have a little part time job working for AMC theaters at the moment.

Which is important that he gets out of the house and he's around other people and he feels a sense of service. Like I think it would be great if he was a server at a restaurant and really got to be in the dirt and got immediately rewarded with tips. I really think that that's part of one of the best parts of American restaurant culture, is a healthy tip environment if you're at a decent restaurant.

So I over answered the question, but those are the things that pop into my head. It's financial independence, its body.

To get past his body consciousness and to have confidence in his ability to control that and also be in a relationship where he is attracting that which he desires instead of putting up with like, you know, and I think Wayne Dyer's manifest your destiny. The overall theme was who do you need to become right now to attract that which you desire or who that you desire into your life where you're not compromising, you're not coping, you're not settling. And I think again, those are.

Absolutely important lessons for wealth creation as well. They're all the same thing. Play the long game.

Play the long game. Okay, well that's probably a good place to come in for a landing here. We've, yeah, some of our, we've described some of our horrendous mistakes and some of our victories and so let's kind of wind things up. Got any other last minute things you want to say before we phase this one out?

I think again, when I look at my formula, it's play the long game.

Be coachable and invest in coaching. Grow your network connections, be willing to build and create a brand new identity. Like my mistake was I'm not good at trading stocks. I lose money in the stock market. It's like if I would have known about creating conscious luck sooner, I would have been doing it. And then growing your personal brand so you get an unfair advantage through the connections and relationships you have and never compromised.

Yeah.

How about you?

Here's to, here's to never compromising in any way, shape or form. Allowing yourself to lead with your genius and letting your genius attract things to you. Because that's the essence part of you speaking. All right, gang, let's wind this one up and wish you well out there in the world.

You got it. Well, as usual, make sure you like, comment, share, share your big lessons and your big takeaways in the comments here. And if you haven't given this podcast a positive review, five stars and some commentary always goes a long way. And if you haven't subscribed to our channel, making sure you do that, too. And think about sharing this episode with someone who could benefit from hearing it. Could be a young person, could be an old person. We we like everyone. So thanks, Gay. Appreciate it. This is a fun episode.

Thanks, Mike.