Our Biggest Mistakes and What We Learned From Them

We are live gay, Hendricks. This is our biggest mistakes and what we learned from them. So I'm really interested to hear what your biggest ones are. I've got some juicy ones myself. And do you want to begin and just go back and forth?

Yeah, sure. Well, I thought we'd do a couple of things from, like, the personal side of life and a couple of things from the business side of life. And when I think of my entire life, of all the things I've ever done.

I've done a lot of work not to consider my first marriage a giant mistake. I've tried to look at it as this giant blessing, but I'm only about 75% there. Even though it happened 50 years ago, I find myself still having arguments with her in my mind sometimes.

And so we call it the starter marriage. That's the way to look at it. This is the one that prepared you for the perfect one. I had one, too.

Oh, you had one, too. Okay. Well, this would be some good fodder. And I. I've learned a tremendous amount because I can see about three or four things that I did that absolutely doomed the relationship from the very beginning, regardless of all the crazy stuff she got up to. But. So I'll try to describe this in a way that doesn't get anybody sued, but when I was. My grandmother was a huge influence in my life, and she died when I was 21, 22 years old. So I'm 75 now. So this goes back 50 years. I didn't realize it at a time how emotionally devastated I was when my grandmother died. I wasn't into psychology or anything like that yet. I'd never had a counseling session. In fact, I, you know, never been to a therapist or anything like that. I was a English major, super intellectual, very overweight, big, thick glasses.

And so I was just really psychologically unprepared for anything like a deep relationship. But I think to get out of this emotional devastation I felt about my grandmother's death, I just couldn't speak. Seem to come to terms with it. And I went out and got into this relationship with a monied woman from Maine and named Linda. And I mentioned moneyed, because I also. In addition to being devastated by my grandmother's sudden death, I also had just lost a bundle of money. I was, at that time, I was working my way through a. Through. Through college as a disc jockey on the radio, and I was making a lot of money, and I was also promoting rock and roll shows, and I was managing rock and roll bands. And so I Had a kind of a foot in every finger in every pie. And so I was making plenty of money booking kind of regional bands and doing shows with them for you know, like maybe three people, 300 people, 400 people, that kind of thing. But I did one with the Young Rascals, they were called at the time the Rascals and made a bunch of money on that. And I got really big headed and I booked a big English group called the Hollies who were very hot at the time now, you know, Graham Nash came from. Anyway, so I took a big risk and I probably would have done great except a freak late hurricane hit Florida the, the week I was having the concert. And usually when we would do a concert there'd be like a couple of thousand people outside waiting to get in and there was nobody outside. So the only thing we had was tickets that we had pre sold, which is in, in that day about half. And you counted on foot traffic for the rest of the half.

So nobody showed up. And I had to sell my fancy Mercedes that I was cruising around, you know, 22 year old in. And I always carried a wad of hundred dollar bills in my wallet at the time. And I was, it was just a different human being than I am today in just about every way. So I was flat broke and emotionally devastated. And I got into this relationship with an older woman who's about five years older. And I honestly think, looking realistically at it, I just got into the relationship to distract myself from all of this grief I was feeling. I mean, it didn't feel like that at the time. It felt like I was interested in her and everything like that. But I ended up, we ended up getting married and moving up to Maine, where she was from. And all the pressures that had been there for the year we lived in Florida sort of escalated when I got up to Maine. I decided to get out of being a disc jockey and change my life and ended up, that's how I ended up getting into the field I'm in now, psychology and therapy and that kind of thing. But so I had this marriage and then we had a daughter. So in the whole four year span, four and a half year span of the marriage, I sort of packed this whole lifetime of.

Distraction really into this one poor marriage. And so obviously it was not going to work. And again, I'm leaving out a whole bunch of stuff on her side that I don't want to get into. But take it from me, it was pretty extreme.

And.

The other thing that I think I was really That I did that was doomed. The relationship was. At the time, I didn't know anything about how to communicate my emotions. I couldn't say, you know, I'm angry with you, or I felt hurt about that. It just wasn't in my skill set. And it was like it was buried down in some shaft and mine shaft in myself that I didn't have access to. And so the only thing I knew how to do was kind of, if she started it, I'd go back at her. If I started it, she'd go back. So we had these long battles, and to this day, I cannot imagine how I could have stood to do that, because I wouldn't be able to take 10 seconds of that kind of emotional conflict today.

So, anyway, I got through that after four years. But the remnants of it lasted for years and years and years because of.

Things that had to be litigated, like property and my daughter's custody. I got into a long custody battle because I didn't want my daughter being raised by her and, you know, sort of a nightmare of all sorts of different emotional conflicts at the time. And I learned a tremendous amount from it. But I still must have a tiny bit of grin in there from it, because sometimes, even today, I'll find myself thinking about it or thinking of something that she did that I'm still mad about.

And so I'm getting activated after all that time. It's like, you're right. Oh, I get it.

Yeah. Because your mind doesn't care if it happened yesterday or 50 years ago, as long as you have a nice, clear picture of it in your mind, it'll fire you up emotionally. And so I've. I. I can. I can say now that it hasn't in the past 20 years. It's really tailed off a lot. But, you know, probably up until 20 years ago, I could still get a good argument going in my mind with her. I think I was so deeply hurt and actually feel guilty and felt guilty about it afterwards because, you know, long after I stopped being really angry about it, I realized that it was all my fault. And I'm sure if she were enlightened, she would say it's all her fault, too. But the only way I could get out of it was by taking full responsibility for it and saying, okay, I dreamed this up. Why did I dream up this kind of particular thing? So I think if. If anybody's looking for a piece of advice out of this, it might be to look at whatever those big conflicts are that you still replay some time in your head and ask yourself, of all the possibilities, why would I have dreamed up this particular thing? And I think I was so numb to all my feelings and so deep in grief, I had to kind of invite somebody into my life who was like a. A human battering ram all the time on the emotional level. But it's. It did awaken me to my emotions finally. And I think that's probably what it took because as soon as I got conversant with my emotions, the relationship kind of faded away and we ended up moving apart physically anyway. Although, as I say, I still have some stuff about it.

Yeah, that's. Well, as I mentioned, in the very beginning, I had a starter marriage as well. It was a high school sweetheart. I'm actually not going to tell you the marriage story because in terms of my mistakes, there have been a couple of them. So I'm going to work backwards first to a little one and then I'm going to get to a jumbo one. That was ultimately one of the biggest learning experiences of my life. And I think the first one is my. Recently I bought an electric bike and my wife and I take it out. Vivian and I go driving and they're absolutely fantastic and fun. So I'm a little bit young. Okay, yes, we have had that conversation. So I'm 54. You're a bit older than me, but I'm out riding. I decide I'm going to take a shortcut. So I get on a trail behind our house and it's going to save two miles to get on a longer, really nicely paid bike trail in San Diego. And I'm cruising along and all once I start running into little stones and they're small at 3 inches and around and they're slippery and then there's soft sand and I'm going a little too fast, probably going about 16 miles an hour, something like that, which isn't fast. But the front of the bike starts swaying in the way these electric bikes are set up, the batteries on the front and it makes it front end heavy. So slide, slide, slide. And oh, once I miss a giant rock, hit another one, do an end over. And I landed. And fortunately I had a sense at the time everything, you know, moved in slow motion. But I didn't put up my hands and my wrists. I knew not to do that, but just allowed myself to fly forward and I landed on my shoulder blade and I broke it.

Or my collarbone rather. And it is been one of the most painful and it is the most pain I've ever experienced in my Life, even it's seven weeks later and.

It still hurts a lot. And so here's the big takeaway. First of all, the time it takes to heal now. And I'm much more aware of my injuries and just how you see someone who looks.

Maybe they're in their 70s and they're in a chair or they can't move any longer. You're just one small injury away. The older you get from becoming incapacitated, that really sunk in. Unfortunately, I didn't land on my, like I said, my hands, my wrist, my face or something worse.

But it really woke me up to just how delicate our bodies are and how precious life is. And you know, you think about, you know, someone just walks their head on a rock and. And they die one day, right? We're just very, very delicate creatures and machines. So that was just a recent one, but I'll get into one from my past that, looking at it now, one of my greatest teachers and then one of my greatest failures as well. But it really woke me up. So I was 18 years old and growing up, I hated the town I was from. I didn't like, I didn't like my circumstance or life. We'll just say. And I didn't like being a kid. I never liked being a kid. I was waiting for the day I turned 18. So I was finally free and I started working literally the day I turned 16 years old full time, because I knew I could buy my freedom. And you know, even the reason what drove me to start writing code when I was younger and learning how to program and learn about computers is I felt it was my way out of a small town life. So shortly after I turned 18, to quote unquote, get out of town, I enrolled in a, in a technical school called Devry Institute of Technology. This particular one was in Kansas City, Missouri, and I was going to study computer science there and I left home.

I had a crappy little car. And the day I was about to leave, like the brakes quit working and I was prepared in my mind to just get on the road and leave, okay. Even though I would have just died. Fortunately, my dad saw me as I was pulling up and I literally couldn't stop and I was moving towards the garage and he says, we're gonna go out and get you a car. So I ended up leaving a day later I got a little Honda Civic. He loaned me the money for that because turned out I had saved a total of maybe $600. That's all I had to my name completely financially unprepared and you know, threw my junk in the back of this little car. And I had never done any drugs at all of any sort. But shortly after I landed I met this kid who's this just total.

Let'S see, very backwoods Arkansas kid who did not like anything that but white people. I'll just, I don't know how else to say it but this guy was 100% typical confederate, like the kind of guy you'd just shake your head at and, and go oh my God. Because every other word was the nword. You know, it was that kind of, kind of a guy. But smoked weed. I know exactly, you know the deal.

You know the deal graduating class.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. There we go. Well, anyway, I tried marijuana for my first time and my first experience was oh my God, what a mind expanding thing. It was great. And then I ended up going out and I bought a little bit of my own and I smoked too much and I had a very, very severe paranoia attack that to this day still haunts me. I mean that's how bad it affected me.

I learned really quickly a my brain does not like weed. And the second thing is never smoke too much of that stuff. And if you were to, you've got to be in the right environment with someone to help get you back to normal. And I didn't have like, I just didn't have any tools, no emotional tools, no communication tools. And I wound up having a nervous breakdown.

I wasn't able to sleep, I quit eating and I just went downhill really fast. And one night I drove home, came home, I literally just had a full on nervous breakdown. I walked in my parents house which they were completely surprised I didn't show up.

And they wonder what's going on. And I'm just like, I'm really struggling and I just went down, I just passed out because I had been awake for almost a week. And then somehow I heard my sister and my mom talking or my mom talking, she says, do you want to drive and pick up your sister at school? Jumped in the car, was in the car and suddenly I had this terrible fear that as soon as I got home my dad was going to rape me. Which I'd never been molested or affected. Nothing weird ever happened to me by my parents but I had this like horrible terror and that's all my brain believed. So I decided in the car that I was going to open up the door and walk out of the car while my mom was driving like 60 some miles an hour down the highway. So my sister Grabbed me, pulled me back in the car, and then I came home and I literally just started babbling and mumbling and I peed my pants. And then my parents, because they weren't equipped for any of this stuff either, they called a priest before they called the hospital. And the priest was there looking at me with these big eyes. My parents were saying, he must be possessed. Right, exactly. They're like, what are you going to do? And, you know, again, that's the environment I grew up in. You know, we were just not emotionally prepared for this kind of thing. And, well, I ended up waking up the next day on the top level of the mental ward of a hospital where I spent a week and a half. And my brain took years to get over that experience. Again, did not have the right tools or resources. But as a result, it was just humiliating and terrifying and literally just to leave. For your brain to not know what is real and what is not real. I feel so much for anyone who's ever had a state of either being totally lost or where something quits working right in your brain. Normal people can go nuts with just the wrong set of inputs.

Well, yeah, a lot of those illnesses, like schizophrenia are. A lot of them have to do with secretions that your body makes from your kidneys and things like that that get out of balance and stir things up. That's. Boy, what an amazing thing. I imagine that's the last time your dad's going to buy you a car.

Well, here's what ended up happening afterwards. You know what he. Both my parents were like. Well, you learned, you know, they. They didn't beat me up over any of this. And when I came home, started working at my. My uncle, Very, very talented woodworker. And I. I mean, I was unemployable. I couldn't think straight. I had panic attacks. You know, it started out where it was every 15 minutes. And I thought I was gonna zoom back in time to the place where I had my panic or my nervous breakdown. You know, it was like I thought I was gonna get dislodged from a time moment and get reset to. I mean, it was like all kinds of weird stuff would happen. But I took a year and I built grandfather clocks in his wood shop. And then I enrolled in another technical school.

And I just got my act together. And the good thing was I was talented. I could hold my act together, and no one knew any of this stuff was going on. I hid it well. It's just that internally weird things were going on inside my brain, literally. For years and, and I was with the.

Things have stopped, Mike.

Yeah, it's a different kind of weird things. So if you want to know where, where, where the creativity comes from, it's just the right mixture of insanity.

But you know, I think that's true of a lot of us that, you know, we kind of have to work the edge to get the good juicy stuff. And yeah, I've had a chance to hang out with a lot of semi crazy geniuses and recovered crazy geniuses.

Right on. Well, the big takeaway anyway was.

That propelled me to work my ass off. You know, I started earning, I got my legs back underneath me and to this day I'm obviously super concerned and worried about any kind of, you know, how any kind of substance can affect my brain and how precious our sanity is. So, you know, again, it's like, you know, we're already walking between the physical and the spiritual realms and, and the emotional realms and this crazy stoup of chemicals that comprises of our bodies and you know, just the wrong thing getting just off like you were talking about.

It's pretty scary. So what else, what else has been a great learning lesson? Regret for you or biggest mistake?

Yes. I want to roll the clock forward to 1998. And.

I had come over from Bantam Double de Dell to Harper because Harper waved a lot more money in front of me. And so I had been publishing my books like Conscious Loving and Conscious Living and Others with Bantam Doubleday Dell. And so I signed up with Harper out in San Francisco, their San Francisco branch, to create a book called the Ten Second Miracle, which is still out there, you can find it. And I was very passionate about this particular subject because what I discovered by going back through a whole bunch of tapes and videos and that kind of thing was that the actual moments that changed people's lives all happened in these little 10 second windows. Like, for example, I would have a couple and they would be going around and around with their stuff for a few sessions and then one of them would tell a 10 second truth. Something like, honey, I had an affair with your sister. Or.

I don't want to do, I don't want to, I want to quit my job or something, some Big Ten. But they always, none of them took longer than 10 seconds. And so I wrote this book really passionately and I got a big advance from it, from Harper, about a quarter of a million dollars if I remember correctly. And so.

And by the way, what year was this?

Just to put it. 98. 19. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And so that was pretty big bucks for that time. And so it was about double what I'd been getting over it. Bantam, Doubleday, Dell. So that was. Anyway, so the mistake part, I think, came from. I had some misgivings about certain aspects of their operation, and I kind of overrode those because the money was so good. So alarm bells go off out there in pod land, folks. And if you're watching this on YouTube.

Those kind of decisions. And I've done that more than once where the money looked great and I overrode some little inside. I bet you've done it 28 dozen times, too. It's part of the deal.

It's always. It's always a people thing. It always comes down to a people thing at the end of the day. Huh.

Huh. Yep. And I. It happened again. So I'm not fully cured because I did it again about seven years ago. I got into business with a. A big New age figure, although I had some initial misgivings about it and turned out to be a disaster. Turned out to be just the worst partner. And so I'm still learning that. But in, in that case wasn't exactly to do with the money, but it's when you overrode some little niggle in there, they have that beautiful word niggling, you know, some little niggle inside yourself that says.

And that is really worth paying attention to because, you know, like my old buddy Jerry Jones says, the best deals I've ever done are the deals I didn't do. And, man, when he first said that, that was like 35 years ago when he first said that to me, I. I didn't quite get what he was talking about because I hadn't had enough life experience yet. But now I know exactly what. What he's talking about. And so.

What happened? I want to just string out the story a little bit. So I wrote the book. I had a lot of passion on the book. And then the editor either got fired or quit or went somewhere else. I think he got fired. Nobody was ever really straight with me about that. But suddenly, like 3/4 of the way through finishing the project, one of the main anchors for it disappeared. And the next person that came in didn't know anything about my particular subject. See, the editor I'd had before had actually signed the book because he loved the subject matter. And this new person came in and said, what's all this stuff? You know, and so that was a. I could feel things wobbling at that moment. Then the next thing that I went along with, which I should have screamed.

No, no, no.

Was they said, we're going to send you out on a, a book tour and it's going to be seven days long around the west and it's going to be over Memorial Day weekend. And I said, Memorial Day weekend. Is anybody going to be anywhere near a bookstore on Memorial Day weekend? And they say, oh yeah, it's the only time we could squeeze it into the publicity schedule. You know, we've got this schedule of 28 different authors and we've week for you and that just happens to be the week. It'll be great, great, great, man. You'll be living in five star hotels for seven days and it'll be just wonderful. Well, guess what? Sometimes I'd be in this big bookstore for a book signing and it would be literally me and four clerks at different stations in the place. I remember one huge bookstore. I can't remember where it was, was Seattle or someplace. I was in this monster bookstore. And it happened to be a beautiful weekend in Seattle, which is pretty rare, you know, where the sun shines all the time. And so it was deserted downtown. And it's only worsened by the other time that I managed to have a book signing in one of those great malls out in the Midwest, in Minnesota, I think it is where I arrived there on the day of the worst ice storm in a hundred years. And there was literally.

I'm from there. I got it.

You're familiar with the ice phenomenon. Well, being a California boy, I had a hard time with that whole ice thing, believe me. But what I'm getting at here is that there's a whole bunch of things that start to wobble and then fall apart if. And things that are not really within my power to control, you know, and so you really have to get comfortable with this aspect of life, which is there are some things which are absolutely not within my power to control and then also take responsibility for those things too. So I'm not showing up as a victim. And so I, you know, I look back on it and I say all the places I could have said no, I refused to go out on a book tour on Memorial Day weekend. They would have probably said, okay, we're not going to send you out on a book tour. Then. Well, that would have been about as good as going out for as far as book sales goes, because it didn't make any difference in the sales of the book. So I'm a big advocate now in really looking carefully at the why beyond the what I'm doing, you know, because I could see my first marriage was a disaster from the beginning because I wasn't there. You know, I was trying to remedy some kind of loss I just had by distraction. And on another occasion, I want to talk about now talk about distraction and things I do and you do to avoid distraction. But believe me, my first marriage, I think if I had to put it in one category, it was a giant distraction to keep me away from pain I didn't want to feel. But in so doing, I created more pain for myself than I could have ever imagined. So.

That'S two disasters in my life and I'm still learning from them.

Yeah, no, I really get that. And when I look at, for me, I think my first marriage, even though I couldn't see this, I didn't even really understand this part of my myself until recently. What I was really doing is avoiding abandonment and fear of being abandoned or being alone, which I know that in itself isn't uncommon, but what was crazy about it is I'd get this person and then I'd get totally immersed in.

Work because my next greatest fear was running out, not having enough, not being enough. And so I got on this complete fear thing where I become distracted and busy and my busyness destroyed the intimacy, what little we had. And then by not being present, it was just a matter of time before the marriage would turn into a gigantic resentment petri dish. So.

I think that's what I noticed in myself. So I'll give you one more that I think is pretty common.

And that is going into business with friends. I've had really long term successful businesses with some friends.

But.

The bigger and more important lesson was at the time when we were cash poor, I would sometimes take on, and it's happened on multiple occasions, where I took on some partners who I would have been better off finding a way to pay them than to have made them partners. Because the cost of getting rid of them later or paying them as equity partners was far greater than what I would have paid them as employees and been able to maintain the relationship. And so, you know, business partnerships are very complex. Just like any kind of a marriage, you know, it's a complicated agreement. And unfortunately, what business arrangements and frankly marriage doesn't accommodate for is when the velocity growth of the partners don't move in the same direction at the same speed. Right. Because inevitably there's always one or the other in general that is evolving faster and in a slightly different direction. That's really what velocity is versus the divergent path, which.

Again, what you were talking about even with the title of that little book or that book where a profound thing happens inside of 10 seconds, where the direction of life can shift.

If both people aren't prepared for those bombshells that show up that change your life in a minute and bring it to a new level of self realization.

Like your brain doesn't know what the difference between one minute and 10 years. It's only that we're reminded by it, by your flesh. Right. Or the significant emotional traumas that take place in between these things. So I think that's again in the interest. Just like when you opened up talking about your marriage, you don't want to open up a can of worms here.

You know, I take full responsibility for my partnership mistakes in the past. You know, it was just like fear based decisions. But being specific would not be kind, you know, because everyone's got a story to tell.

Yes, I've got a stack of those. And I've learned the same thing the hard way, to pay people rather than to make them equity partners. I've literally offed several million dollars that way. And so I'm very. I learned that lesson though I haven't done that now in quite a few years. So I feel very happy about that. Well, I think the best way to think of this is that nobody's ever going to arrive fully at the destination. But the only thing you can do is kind of keep learning from the curveballs life sends you. I just got a curveball from my publisher. I have my book, the Genius Zone is coming out and it was coming out April 20th. And so I'd arranged a bunch of PR stuff to do around April 20th. Here comes the curveball. They said due to pandemic and editorial issues and everything, we're moving your book to June 29th. And so, you know, suddenly I had to put a whole bunch of people into a scramble of booking various things. And so, but you know, that is the way life works. That's the way business works. And just like you didn't when you drove out of that driveway, you didn't say, hey, you know, I think I'll lose my mind for a while. You know, it just happened at you. And thank goodness you had that wood shop to focus on though. That's a, that's a really genius solution to that problem, you know, to.

Yeah, when in doubt, use your hands. That's what you know. And, and idle hands do the devil's.

But yeah, it is that great actor.

Daniel Day Lewis, his life was kind of getting a little out of control. So what did he do? Sign up to be an apprentice shoemaker in Italy, and he spent a year or two of his life apprenticing to an Italian genius, craft master craftsman, cobbler, and, you know, things that will just get you back into the world itself. You know, the three dimensional world. Well, good. Anything else to say before we wrap this one up, sir?

No. I think this is interesting and I think the big takeaway for all of our listeners and viewers, this is just a great, great reason to journal. But if you sat down right now and wrote down two of your most recent.

Failures and what you learned from them, also your two greatest, grandest ones from your past that completely reshaped your life, what would they be? If you've got some. You got anything out of this? Make sure you leave comments for us, whether it's on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or any of the other places where we post these episodes. Of course, share it with someone you know. That's the best way this podcast can grow through referrals, and it's really going to come from you. So I want to thank you for listening, dialing in, watching, and sharing the podcast. Gay. Anything else?

Yes. If you like what you're hearing and want a wild, big, grandiose experience of it, go over to Big Leap, big leap podcast, bigleeppodcast.com and find about. Find out about our Big Leap experience.

That's right. That's right. We're going to be delivering an experience. Way to get past your upper limits, to grow beyond your wildest imagination, both emotionally, spiritually, physically. We're talking about money, building your platform, but also we're going to be delivering part of this experience through VR, through virtual reality, something that both Gaye and I are really, really interested in. So you'll be exposed to some new technology and. And there's nothing to be intimidated by, because we're going to take care of all that for you. So thanks for that reminder, Gabe. It's awesome.

All right, thanks, Mike. Great being with you. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in.

Yep. See you soon.

All right, well, let's. Let's record a quick intro then. Are you ready?

Yep.

All right, do you want to open or start it or should I?

Why don't you start it and I'll chime in?

Okay. Okay, great. On three, two. Hey, this is Mike Koenigs. Welcome to the Big Leap Podcast. I am here with my good friend and co host Hendricks, and this episode is all about our biggest mistakes and what we learn from them. Gay.

Yes, I've got a stack of juicy mistakes in my life, and I hope I've learned some things from them. But we talk about some of our biggest mistakes. A couple on the personal side, like marriage and early marriage and a couple of big ones on the business side. But they all have some similar qualities to them. And as always in life, it's about what you learn from the things that happen. So join us for this episode.

Right on. And I've got one other thing to add. If you're wondering what's in the background. Am I in a bar? No, I'm actually right now in Las Vegas at a friend's condo penthouse overlooking the Las Vegas strip. So in case you're wondering, is this guy crazy?

What's wrong?

Where's all that booze coming from? It's not the booze. It's part of the show. So we'll see you here in this episode. Stand by and let's roll the intro.

Good enough.

Good enough.