The Big Leap EP#55 - Our Biggest Leaps of 2021

Hi, this is Gay Hendricks, and welcome to the Big Leap Podcast. On this episode, we're going to dive deep into our own personal big leaps during the year of 2021 and look forward to what some of our own big leaps and what yours are for the next year.

All right, so we're going to give you some ways of thinking, some questions you can ask, and also, Gay, as usual, has some really interesting insights on how to think differently about the new year, and you're going to find out what his next, your big creative leap is going to be and what he's looking forward to. So all that and more in this episode. Welcome to the Big Leap.

Hello and welcome to the Big Leap podcast. I'm Gay Hendricks, along with Mike Koenigs, your host, and today we're going to invite you to time travel with us over the past year. We want to do a conversation today about our own personal big leaps in 2021 and some of the big leaps we're looking for personally in the next year. And as we do that, I want you to reflect on what your biggest leaps have been during 21 and what you're up for in the next year. So, Mike, how you doing over there?

Great. Great. It's so nice to be here. A ton's happened since we spoke with each other last. I know you had an amazing vacation, and we bought a place in Mexico and have been spending a bunch of time.

Living happily ever after. So that's one of my big leaps, is we made, both Vivian and I made some very specific commitments to our happily ever after plans, and it's changed my internal psychology, and I've got a couple insights that will go along with the big leap. So I'm excited. This is going to be a fun episode, and I'd love you to start. What was or were your biggest leaps of the year?

Well, my biggest Leap was my 40th wedding anniversary with Katie, and we started our 40th wedding anniversary celebration in New York back in October when I was back there giving a speech. And then we decided to bookend it with a trip to Maui just a couple of weeks ago. So we started in October and finished in December, celebrating what to me has been the greatest transformational journey that of my life, having a woman in my life, Katie, that I could grow and change and go through all sorts of stuff with, you know, going through low spots and then getting selected by Oprah and have her wave her magic wand over us 30 years ago. And all of that that led to. And so we've had this incredible journey. So that was my biggest leap this year, I would say. Well, I had an unexpected big leap in the form of what in the investing world is called a liquidity event.

Katie and I got a call about 15 years ago from a friend of ours and said, hey, some people here in Ojai are putting together a company called Ojai Energy Systems about a way to build an environmentally friendly battery. And of course, Tesla wasn't known at the time, so this was an advanced version of what they use in the Tesla cars now. And our battery is used in other kinds of cars like that. But Katie and I try to, if possible, invest in anything promising that's local. So we've invested in two or three things around locally that were total flops and, you know, two or three things that were good. But that's just one of our missions, is to help local entrepreneurs as best we can get a foothold in the world. And we've sponsored two or three businesses this year that have now paid us back and are going solid on their own. So it's a very satisfying kind of thing for us. And so we put some money into this new company, and it proceeded not to do very well for a long period of time. They struggled and struggled and struggled, and for a while, even the CEO was. Was.

Not taking any money. And so that's a bad sign when you get down to the part where the.

Never good. So it was right next to the bone, but we believed in it and we kept supporting it. And suddenly, a couple of months ago, a big conglomerate named Briggs and Stratton, who started making lawnmower engines and now makes jet engines and electric walls and all sorts of stuff like that, it's a big conglomerate. They made a bid on our energy system, which is now called Simplify, and bought us all out. Unbeknownst to most of us, this all happened very quickly and sort of backstage. And so one day you get an email and said, we'd like to buy all your stock for $3 and a quarter a share. And it was a great, unexpected liquidity event. And so big financial windfall, and we got busy. See, at my stage of the game and where Katie and I, we're in our 70s now, and we pretty much made our fortune quite a long time ago. And so we're having a blast, giving a lot of it away. And so we.

A client of ours came up with an idea and did it. And it worked so well that we borrowed his idea, which was we made a grant. We found that there were 380 needy families in our area that had children. And so we made a donation to the local.

Toy shop here to give a gift certificate to all of those families for their kids to have a good toy. And so that, to me, was one of the most satisfying things.

We did all year long. And we've. We sort of tried to do it anonymously, but then the word leaked out, so I decided to just go public with it. But it's been a very satisfying thing to do because we've got a lot of thanks from people that heard about it. So. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Wow. No, I love that. And I'm curious for you, what would have been your biggest creative big leap this past year? Either creation or creativity?

I would say my biggest leap I'm still in the middle of. Because I made a decision.

I've been in the middle of writing a memoir for the last year or two, and I showed it to an agent this year and he made a really great suggestion that I add a piece on.

It's a lot of personal stories, but he suggested I added a piece at the end that was about how my work evolved and where the major turning points were that led me into all the stuff that I have written about in my books, all the different techniques and tools we used. What was the personal experience under those? And so I'm in the middle of writing that now, and. And that has been so much fun. One of the things Mike, you probably heard me say is, you know, you're in your genius zone when you lose track of time and get so into the work you're doing that all of a sudden somebody says, hey, it's dinner time. And you say, oh, oh, yeah. I realize I've been hungry for the last two hours, you know, and so that's been happening to me so much in the writing of this new piece of the memoir. And to me, that's like dessert all the time, living in that space of that sweet spot of my genius. So I'd say that's another creative big leap that's been going on. Also adding to that, I had a big insight this year about what to do with my as yet unpublished mystery novels. See, I have two mystery series that already have a bunch of books in them. One to do with my Tibetan Buddhist private detective, Tenzing Norbu. There's five books there, and then there's three books by my other hero, Sir Errol Hyde, who's my kooky Victorian era detective. And so I suddenly had a realization. I don't want to go through five book launches. What I'm going to do is release an omnibus volume of the three Sir Errol mysteries. They're going to be called Sir Errol the Lost Years. And then an omnibus bottom volume of the two Tenzing Norbu ones and kind of complete the whole series that way rather than to have to do five things in a year. So that was another creative leap where it suddenly see I'm always Mike looking for it. Could this be easier? Could this be more elegant? Could what I'm doing be in any way simpler? You know, Einstein said you've got to make things as simple as possible but not too simple. You can't oversimplify them either. You've got to find that sweet spot of just what is the most efficient way to bring forth the information. So that's been a big one for me and it's still happening because I was up this morning at 4:30 or 5 and I wrote till 7:30 in that sweet spot of just time just not existing.

I love that that's something that.

I have not been producing content like you have in that regard and I've been doing it differently. So I'll tell you a couple of my big leaps and we always have a lot of parallels happening. So we celebrated our 20th anniversary this year.

And that led us to really getting clear on what we want for our future. So we focus this year on preparing for as much happily ever after as possible. So that's a question I ask myself all the time is what does happily ever after look like? And one of the strategies that you've shared and I use all the time now is how you.

Into things wonder question and one day I was hmming in and I realized something which I. I know what you and I have talked about. I can't remember if we recorded it but I realized that I am going to say no to anything that I feel during the hmm exercise would exceed 5.0001% aggravation. So an aggravation free life is a happily ever after life. And I realized in that thinking that.

Growth happens through pressure and resistance and conflict. But I don't think it happens through aggravation. Aggravation I don't think is a good source of growth other than when you know it's there. And now it's not about avoiding it, it's just about realizing who or what would cause it. So I had a very very.

I had a big opportunity come to me this year that I decided not to do. It could have been extremely profitable. But I just know, it would be something I'd have to create a detailed legal document to protect myself inside of this. And to me, anything involving a bunch of lawyers and lawyering up and something where I have to worry about whether or not I can trust the other party is pure aggravation. So it was just a hard no.

So the other thing that I happened, now you've had a bunch of them and again, I'm just going over some of the similarities while you're going through it. I had my first significant liquidity event this year. I still haven't received the check. It should be here any day now. But.

That I'm excited about. And we have a couple more in motion. But there, you know, I. We didn't really start actively investing on the level you do. You know, I'm a couple years behind you, but I'm excited. It really felt good because this thing we did over 15 years ago now.

And that's a long ass time, especially for a startup, a zero interest loan, basically.

And then.

Another one that I mentioned briefly is we just bought property in Mexico. It's a giant strawberry field. And we're calling my studio that I'm going to build on the property Strawberry Fields. Strawberry Fields Studio. And part of that's because I've always loved the Beatles. I really got inspired during the last the documentary, which we're going to talk about in another episode. But.

We'Re excited because there's space on it. We can have a regenerative farm where basically it can be food independent, land independent. We have our own well and build something down there. Which is a huge leap for me and us. I've avoided real estate like the plague because it's always felt overwhelming and scary.

The next one is.

Zach went to CU Boulder.

Excuse me, Mike, May I? Before you go to Zach, could I ask you a little bit more about the real estate thing?

Yeah, for sure.

First of all, just to you know, I don't own any real estate in a foreign country, but when I think of owning real estate in a foreign country, suddenly my mind goes off like a firecracker episode of potential problems, you know, and I oh yeah, what about that? What have you done to keep that aggro free?

That's. That is a massive breakthrough. So here's why it happened and how it happened. So what started it is Vivian.

Went to Chip Conley's mea, or Modern Elder Academy for a little bit of a break and a sabbatical to work on her next book. And she wrote me within two days and Said, I love it here so much. I love the community, I love the culture. There's a lot of what we'd call high frequency alien entrepreneurs down there. It's got that sort of a mindset. It's crunchy, yet productive. So you know, there's yoga and farm to table restaurants.

And.

Because Chip had done it, she got to know his partner Jeff, and then met the other partner and then started asking questions. And pretty soon she was doing the three cups of tea. Go out and visit and meet the people. Because down there, here's the problem with Mexico and real estate.

Everything's gray and like you could have a deal get pulled out from underneath you because you don't understand the rules. So for example, the way property became. So basically the government during the revolution took all the property away from the wealthy folks and gave it to the farmers.

And the way the property laws work down there is if you own the property, then your children and their children also own it. So if you die, you have to get sign off to sell the property from all of the heirs. And if one of them doesn't sign it, they can come back and say what? That property is still theirs. Okay. Even if they got the money, doesn't matter. So there's stuff like that. So clear title is a big deal. And there's more than that. There's something called the Ajito, which is kind of like a co op that manages and there's, there's just a whole bunch of rules that are complicated and, and she started meeting lots and lots of people and discovering like how to not get screwed. And her big breakthrough came from one day she said, I know I could do this. When I realized I'd built over 50 structures in.

In Uganda and I've never gotten screwed.

So that she said, I know I can do it in Mexico. I know how to go about asking questions. And, and you know, part of what you do when you're in Mexico is you can go and you can ask the same question. You get 10 different answers from 10 different people. And then one time, you know, we were like, well, how much? Like we bought this property? Or we're about to. And it's like, well, how big of a plot do you need in order to call it a separate space? And one realtor said, well, it's no less than 2,000 meters. And she goes and talks to someone else. And the guy who's a Mexican goes.

Depends who you ask. Basically it depends who signs off on the paperwork. Is that answer. Now we as Americans think that Everything's black and white. And we believe our legal system is. It's stacked in different ways. So when you start thinking differently, you can really get a lot done. But if you do things wrong, like if you go down there and think you can just start waving cash around and get stuff done, the Mexicans hate that. They will block you and prevent you from doing stuff for years if they feel like it. So it really has to do with being neighborly, building relationships and asking for permission. But one of the great things that happened as a result of this, first of all, we can build down there for under 100 bucks a square foot for really nice stuff compared to the U.S. you know, you can spend 5,000 bucks a square foot in some areas. But.

We created a Mexican corporation which gives us immediate ability to become permanent residents, which then means we can get a second passport. And there are benefits and advantages to that. So part of my goal in the future is more access to different places. So this is just a pathway of getting there. Okay, well, I hope I answered your question.

I want to draw a big conscious circle around something that may require further fine tuning, which is getting your.

No hassle, no aggro life reconciled with building any kind of structure anywhere. So I wish you well. My wife and I, Katie and I have.

Built a cabin at 9 or 10,000ft. We've remodeled 102 year old Victorian. We've remodeled a couple of our beach house. And anyway, we've done a lot of stuff and we've always had experience. Even though we go in consciously, it always seems to follow that basic maxim of takes twice as long as we ever imagined it would do and costs twice as much as we ever dreamed it would. Yeah.

So we're starting with a casita. So. And we've always got the chance of the property already will increase in value within months or the land, if it sucks, we can always get out and do. Do just.

Yeah, well, that's a good thing.

Because at $100 a square foot, you could pretty much bail and. And not get wounded too badly.

Yeah, that's exactly right. It's pretty interesting. And we're right next to the water. I mean, it's so breathtakingly beautiful down there. I'll make sure I send over some videos and I get them popped in for the visual viewers here so they can see it.

But that's. Yeah, no, and believe me, I've thought about it a lot and that's the reason I avoided it, because I've heard how many divorces have happened because of building and that kind of stuff I hate. I mean, I just will just say I won't have anything to do other than to come up with the ideas and I'm going to outsource it all because I'm better off making money and doing what I do than doing having anything to do with that. But Vivian enjoys the detail and the challenge.

That's really good. And I know you guys have a very strong relationship, so this won't apply to you. But in Colorado, when I lived out there, there was a saying among the local psychiatrists and psychologists that when a new therapist moved to Colorado, they immediately did three things. They bought. First they bought a four wheel drive vehicle. Then they built their dream house. Then they got a divorce. And it happened one time over and over and over again. And I think what happens a lot of times is a lot of couples.

Put their kind of quote, put their money on a project to keep their relationship together. And that doesn't generally work very well.

No, that's like thinking a baby is going to fix all your problems.

But I really, you know, Vivian has such a great quantitative mind as well as having a big heart. So if anybody can do it, she can. So bless your heart. By the way, just, I've never been to the name of that town down there. What's it called again?

Todos Santos or Pescadero?

Todos Santos and Pescadero. So just give me a quick picture of what I would see if I drove over the hill and saw that for the first time.

Okay, so you'd land and start in Cabo and you drive north on the Pacific side about an hour and a lot of it on the way there. It's for one thing, you're right along the ocean the whole time. And it's like sand and mountains, hills.

And cactus. And then there are spots of like, there's a lot of mango down there, for example, and lots of fields. So this place just before you get into Todo Santos, which by the way, is where the original Hotel California is, it's a smallish town and it's very much a surf town. So it's very tropical feeling, very sandy, Mexican, but not dirty, it's clean, the people are super sweet. And you'll see a lot of like Baja style pickups and dune buggies. And then when you go into our little area, Pescadero, lately it's been featured in like lots of magazines. A lot of celebrities are going to that town to get married.

So to answer your question, when you pull in you'd see like a big strawberry field and basil fields. There's a lot of agriculture there. And then you'll see a whole bunch of palms and banana trees, like I said, mango. And it's fairly sparse right now, but they're building quite a bit more because, like a hotel came in that's going to be high end on the beach. And more services are showing up, but you see, like little organic.

Marketplaces.

Little shops. So it's a mixture of old and new. And the gringos down there, meaning us.

In general, what you find are very respectful. They want to integrate and support the community. They're finding ways to create community opportunities, creating jobs for the locals. But, you know, you can go to a nice. There's this place called the Baja Bean. It's a little coffee shop that's about maybe a mile from our property where we bought. And when you walk in, there's no inn. It's just an outdoor thing and surrounded with mango trees. When you go there, there's mangoes everywhere and a lot of outdoor seating. Free WI fi. So that's where people just go communally. And you'll see a bunch of Mexicans, you'll see a bunch of gringos sitting around. But it feels very integrated. If you go to half a mile to the south, there's the Cerritos Surf Beach. So this big surf spot, you go a little bit north, they call it Big Bar. About a half a mile, that's another surf beach. So we're right smack between some great surfing and. But it's. Whales are everywhere. You'd go out to the water, Blank beach.

And you'll see dolphin and whale quite a few months out of the year. Maybe someone fishing, but it's like no one's on the beach.

Well, you got me convinced.

Clean and master. Oh, it's so nice. It's like I pulled in. When Vivian talked about it, we had been to Toro Santos before, but not with this intention. And I was like, this feels like home. I felt home there. And I love San Diego. I don't have anything wrong with it, but it felt different and simpler. And it's clean. It's very, very clean. And one last little thing Vivian sent. She was there this weekend to finish the deal. She sent me a video. And there was rain in the distance. So imagine it's sunny, a lot of sun, but in the distance are rain clouds. And the way the morning sun was hitting the clouds in the rain, it was pink rain. It was really pretty. So, yeah, all right.

So that's going to be taking up quite a bit of your attention in the new year, it sounds like.

Yeah, probably we'll move to. It'll probably be a year and then we'll move down there about half time once I get the studio built and you know, we'll just go back and forth. It's only a two hour flight, so it's easy. It's very easy.

Well, great. Well, I'm. I'm excited about that. I'm excited for you, but you've got my interest peak now. As you know, Chip and I. I've never actually met Chip but know we've heard of each other and everything and a guy put together a conversation with us that'll be coming up in January. So I'm looking forward to.

Bouncing around ideas with him and he's invited me to come down there a few times and already. So it's happening.

Well, yeah, we'll make it happen for sure. And something else to consider.

Well, let's get Chip on this podcast because he already said yes. I talked to him and that would be another great thing. He's a great interview, really entertaining. He has some very interesting insights about aging and wisdom that I know you're just gonna. You're gonna just tear into them. You guys have a lot in common and you'll appreciate each other the way you. Each other thinks.

Well, good. Well, let's. Let's wrap her up and see where we can get to next.

Yeah, that sounds great. I do have one quick thing. If you had one big leap for 2022, what would it be to get.

All my remaining books launched in elegant ease with great profit to my publishers and ourselves.

Ooh, that's juicy.

How about yourself?

That's juicy. Well, I was looking at.

All my lists. You know what I am definitely interested in is more impact with less effort, as generic as that sounds. And.

I have a tendency to create a lot of work for myself even though great opportunity comes along with that. I appreciate and enjoy it. But I would like to move towards less effort and more impact and.

Avoiding busy. It's so easy to fall into the busy scale. And so.

That would be. It is. You know, I'm looking for some shortcuts for that. It might be some big questions. I'll ask you about effortless manifestation.

That's a great question. In fact, I have a lot to. And specifically what I want to recommend to you and we can talk about this in the next get together is becoming a master of non linear receiving. You know you're a master of linear receiving. You know how to work your tail off and generate a lot of good, positive backflow. But I would like you over the next few years to get just as masterful and at receiving for no reason at all.

Yes, I'm open to that. And I started down that path a couple of years ago, and I just got so interested in.

Some things that required some quite a. Quite a bit of effort. And it just has to do with, like, creating systems and processes that produce big results. I have so much fun creating the results, but it doesn't necessarily create leverage. So I am 100%. I took a note on that, so I'm going to say yes to that. Kay. So do you want to wrap this episode up, then?

Yeah. Well, we've had a good time here, kind of going through some of our own big leaps and looking forward to the future. I'd really like to encourage you, as you listen to this and watch this, to use it as an opportunity here at the end of the year to reflect on what were my big leaps this year. Things, particularly you can celebrate, because a lot of us go around thinking of negative things that we've done or not done during the year. But I want you to really live in a space of celebration where you can get underneath all that stuff and say, wow, and get into a space of gratitude about it for the end of the year.

I love that.

Thank you.

All right. And always remember. Well, let's always remember that we'd love it if you would go over and review this podcast and say if you appreciate it. And we also want to remind you that we're still collecting names and building our waiting list for our big Leap event. And so, Mike, remind him where to go to sign up for that.

Yeah. Thank you. So there's two ways to register. One is to text bl 285-5955-3958. Or you can just head on over to bigleappodcast.com apply. Or there's a big old button right on the front desk that you can apply to get some information on the opportunity to spend some time with Gay and me, both virtual and in person. And, yeah, it'll be an absolute blast. So, once again, Gay, always, always really insightful to get your thoughts. And I'm looking forward to our next episode.

All right, thanks, Mike. Yep.