The Hidden Formula for Success and Wealth

What you think about, what you visualize, what you affirm, what you feel and what you take action on changes the course of your destiny. You can take command of that. No matter what you've been through, no matter what you've gone through, no matter what you're going through, you can take command of that and change your direction. That was the first night I believed maybe I could overcome my learning problems and learn how to become somebody who could read and be intelligent someday.

I've been excited to talk to you for so long. You have been a linchpin in transforming lives from the inside out for as long as I can remember. And you know, this show could go a lot of different directions in a lot of different ways. But I want to, if it's all right with you, I want to focus on the entrepreneur just a little bit straight out of the gate. Because I know for me, long before I became an 8, 9 figure entrepreneur, I had to overcome like just me, my limiting beliefs and all that kind of stuff. And now I was talking with a mutual friend of ours yesterday, or my book agent, Nina, who was, we were chatting it up and I mentioned you and I are going to have a show together. She's like, oh, I love John, you know, kind of thing. And I got to thinking about, as I'm helping her kind of shape some of her business pieces, there's always this limiting belief side. There's always this, this essence of overcoming self to even allow for manifestation of great things to come your way. Talk to me a little about the how to change that mind shift or kind of setting the tone to really, really step into greatness.

Every human being, regardless of age, culture or gender spectrum.

Lives moment by moment by a set of priorities, a set of values, things that are most to least important in life. You couldn't call it a hierarchy of values. Whatever's highest on that value list, they are spontaneously inspired from within to pursue it. And they're willing to embrace pain and pleasure equally in the pursuit of it. So they don't perceive things interfering with it. They just see it as feedback on the way instead of in the way. But as you go down that list of values, they become more extrinsic and it requires more motivation to get them to do it. I'll use the analogy of a young boy who likes video games. The mother doesn't have to get in there and say, johnny, go and do your video game.

Stop. No they don't. I had two adult kids that just like that. Yeah.

So they spontaneously do what they Value, they may not do what we value, but whatever's highest on an individual's values, they spontaneously take action and he will not. The boy is not going to stop learning how to do the video games until he conquers the game.

Yeah.

So he will embrace and he'll see the challenges as great, great, let's do it again and see it on the way and figure it out. But anytime you're trying to do something low on your values, you require motivation to do it. That's why his mom in order to do the clean his room. If you don't clean your room, you can't play the video game. But once you do, you can play. So she'll use external motivation to get him to do it. But on things that are external motivation, we procrastinate, hesitate and frustrate. And we have a subjective bias instead of an objective view. And we see things with a skewed distortion. And we tend to think see things as easier when they're not with a false positive or not as easy as they are with the false negative. And they distort things. And so we as a result of that, we feel less confident when we do. We brain offload decisions to other people. We put upon pedestals. We then inject their values into our life and try to live by somebody else's values, cloud the clarity of what's important to us and end up injecting those values into our life and then thinking I should be like them instead of being who I am. And that's where all the limiting beliefs come. Anytime you have a conflict between what you really value and what the values that you keep injecting, you'll have an internal conflict. And this is what we call the limiting beliefs.

It makes me think of the about four years ago, right before COVID Time magazine and Time magazine conjunction with the Harris Pole surveyed, I think it was 300,000 people and other 300,000 people, 70 plus percent of them said that they felt unfulfilled, unhappy. They're not living in their best or not, you know, they're not living their life etc the best way they know how. And it made me think of something along the way. If we have 70% of the population that feels like they're not living their best life, is it possible they're actually living someone else's life, meaning whatever's been programmed on them or through them or in them that they're not actually they're not being authentic? I guess yes.

You just nailed it. The moment we subordinate to somebody else and are too humble to admit what we see in them inside us we'll have emptiness. And that emptiness will make us look for immediate gratification instead of long term mission. And that media gratification is transient. That's where we go buy, buy clothes to make us feel better about ourselves and spend ridiculous fees on mature brands or something. We're going overeat. We're going over shop. We'll go and take drugs. We'll do porn or whatever, you know, anything to escape the unfulfillment.

But the second we prioritize our life and really identify what's really meaningful to us and prioritize our life and learn the art of delegating the other stuff and getting on with what's meaningful, our executive center comes in. I always tell people that your addictive behaviors are a compensation for unfulfilled highest values. The moment you live by your highest values, you don't sit there and subordinate to people. Fulfill. Take a command. Wake up your leader. There's a leader in everyone. But as long as they compare themselves to others instead of compare their daily actions to what they value most, they're going to end up subordinating and comparing. You know, Phelps said it really well when he got all those medals. If I compared myself to the guy left and right of me when I was about to dive into the water, I lost my gold. Yeah. My focus is my, my mission of going and swimming. I don't notice this. Yeah. I've already trained on everything that they could do, how I would respond to it. My mission is now focus on my mission and let those distractions stop. So we, we go through and we compare ourselves to others instead of compare our daily actions to our own dreams. And that's what blocks us. Because now we're trying to fix others to be like us if we're looking down on them. We're trying to fix ourselves to be like them if we're looking on them. And anytime you're trying to be somebody you're not or trying to get other people to be somebody they're not, you got futility.

Yeah.

And all that energy wasted on something that's non productive.

Yeah. And it makes me think of something else. When I'm. When I'm coaching and creating strategy sessions for entrepreneurs. One of the things that I'm realizing about 50% of them are trying to build a business that's incongruent with what's really gifted to them. And it's almost like they have to go through an evolution. I know I Did. Early on I had to go through three different evolutions of building a business that was more congruent with who I was. And the moment I got congruent with who I was or who I, you know, I was authentically trying to be, all of a sudden a lot of opportunities started coming my way. Um, I want to rinse something past you really fast because you brought up the word distraction, which I think is pretty very important, especially with any level of performance or high achievers or entrepreneurship. In this case, I had the entrepreneur I was meeting with yesterday, for example. I'm down here in Dallas, Texas for an event, but decided to hit as many of my clients as I possibly could, right? Trying to that super service kind of deal. But one of the things that kept coming up is they kept saying, well, I know I need to do this, this and this, but I don't do this, this and this. All right, so keep in mind. So phase one is they're congruent. They're building a business that's congruent with their God given strengths and talents. They have a basic framework, but they're missing, I call it like a piece of Swiss cheese. That Swiss cheese is missing some holes in it, right? And inside of those holes it seems like rather than trying to figure out where the missing hole is, they would rather focus on something else to prevent themselves from having to look for the missing hole. Does that make sense?

When people say my highest value is running a business, that's not exactly the whole truth.

I have a business, a global business. All I do is teach, research, write and travel. Every single thing is delegated out to lots of specialists. I'm not doing administrative, I'm not doing financial, I'm not doing those things. I'm teaching research and writing. So many times people go off on their business and, and they are really inspired about this, this, this, this, and they spontaneously do it because it's really high in their values. And then all of a sudden they got this administrative glitch or this sales glitch or whatever and they don't have a specialist to delegate that to. And now they're trapped because they're now got an incongruency. So unless they take that action and ask how specifically is doing this, at least temporarily until I can delegate it, helping me fulfill what's meaningful and make a neuroplastic link in my brain. So I'm now fired up to do it, they're going to keep procrastinating, hesitating and frustrating because it's not as High. That particular action is not high on their values and they probably got wounds associated with it because you're going to hesitate on doing something anytime you've associated pain more than pleasure with it. So he probably got a wound in there. Unless we identify the wound and reframe it back into the mission, they're probably going to hesitate. But I always say to go do what you love through or delegating or love what you do. Linking.

Yeah.

But don't sit there and bang your head against the wall because you'll just beat yourself up thinking, I should be doing this.

Yeah.

Anytime you hear yourself saying I should, I ought to, I supposed to, I got to, I have to, I must, I need to. It's not you, it's some injected value by somebody outside you because you don't should yourself. Yeah. You're only shooting when you've got an internal. Is internalized injected value by an authority coming inside your head.

Wow. Wow. It also had me thinking just a second ago, as you were, as you were explaining that one of the things that we got in, we were had, we had lunch as part of our conversation. This is going to be kind of like, this is kind of cool because we're giving kind of real talk for real entrepreneurs, which is perfect for the audience inside of this conversation. Going back to that, that pain versus pleasure thing, I challenged this particular entrepreneur to reframe it a little bit. They're like, well, every time, every time I'm trying to do this, I got this going on in the background back of my head. But I know it's taken care of. I said, well, what if you, rather than focused on the what the perceived pain over here, what if you focus on what you're missing out on if you don't take these steps? Now, is that a form of reframing, maybe rephrasing a question or linking in your terminology? Or is that something a little different?

You can. No, that's a reverse link. You can use pain or pleasure to do the link. You can say, if you do this, what could be the benefit of doing this action? How will it help you fulfill your value? Or if you don't do this, what will be the pain of you in relationship? How will it interfere with your value? Either side can get you to go back onto a focus. So either one of them are useful. They're both operant conditioning responses. The key is to give yourself permission to go and do what you're really committed to, what you spontaneously do.

Yeah.

Can I share with something that I know would Help entrepreneurs.

Absolutely.

A six step thing that I do. Scale my.

Yeah, please.

I'm 27 years old. I just opened up with my shingle in my, my clinical practice and I'm doing everything. Just like young people start their entrepreneurial band, they're doing everything. And I didn't mind doing the long hours. I didn't mind doing everything, but still I could just see that this isn't, this is going to not be the greatest way. I need to hire some people to do some of this. I didn't go to professional school for 10 years to do this little be trivial thing. And, and so I went over to a bookstore and they had Walden's bookstores in those days. Went to this bookstore and I got this book called the Time trap by Alec McKenzie. And I read through this thing and dogged it and marked in it and you know, underlined and all that stuff. And I summarized it into a six step process. And if I shared, I guarantee you anybody who's listening is going to go, thank you.

Cool, let's go.

The first thing I did is I made a list. I, I made a, I, I made a form with six columns on it. So I put five lines on a form, six columns and the far left column. I wrote down daily actions and I wrote down every single thing I do in a day over a three month period that I would do. And I really got an exhaustive list. And I don't mean vague generalities like marketing. I mean, made these calls, documented this system, you know, looked up this email address. I broke it down into the detailed action steps, not vague labels. And I made a list of every single thing I did, multiple pages, just so I could look at what am I actually doing. Not what I fantasize that I'm doing. Not what I wish I was doing, but what am I actually doing in my life right now. Honestly, I got a drone looking down on me, videoing me, and there it is. I'm looking at what I really do. That's the first step. When you do that, you'll immediately start having these senses. I'm majoring in minors and mining and majors all over the place. Guarantee it. Yep. I've been doing a long time. Yep. I'm almost 69 now. I'll be 69 in a couple months. So I've been doing it for 40.

Years and it's worked out.

Yeah. Now the second column after you got that big list is how much does it produce per hour?

How much does that little action generate per hour? So sometimes you'll do it for 20 minutes. You multiply it times three. Sometimes you'll do it for two hours. You'll divide it by half. You extrapolate what does it produce per hour. I had a whole lot of lists on there that didn't produce anything, I'm sure, but I was doing them.

I would say probably a loss of production.

I was doing this absolutely. It's costing. So I made a list on there and I found out that what I went to school for wasn't the top one. Actually going in there and going out and speaking and engaging people in my business and what I'm doing and speaking to them generated more business. I calculate I could generate 18 to $20,000 an hour doing that. We're actually doing the cubicle work. I can make 1800 an hour. And I thought, wow, here I'm going to professional school to go and sit in that little cubicle and do this clinical work. But that's not the most efficient thing I could be doing. Business wise. Yeah, clinical wise, but not business wise. But I made a list of that and put dollar values in it. I did the best extrapolation I could. And this is multiple pages. And when I got through, I reprioritized it on what produces the most per hour, all the way down to what gives me zeros. I immediately decided, wait a minute, I'm not charging for things that is up my time, taking up my time. So I immediately started to value my time and charge for things that I wasn't charging for, which helped. And I immediately started to look at, as long as I'm doing this, I got nobody to look at except myself why I'm not getting productive. So I prioritized it all in the third column.

How much meaning does it have? Ten being, I can't wait to get up in the morning and do it. I'm dreaming about it all night. I'm inspired by it. I tap dance to work. What is it I just can't wait to do down to? Oh, I have to do that. Whenever you hear yourself have to do it, gotta do it, must do it, should do it. You know you've got a break on cause it ain't you. It's some injected value, what you think you should be doing according to somebody you picked up on. Yep. When I did this list and I reprioritized that list according to what is most meaningful and inspiring spontaneously, what's highest on my value to least. Then I looked at what was most productive and most meaningful, and I found that there were about Six things that overlapped and I knew where I needed to go because that's the most inspiring and most productive things I can be doing. The next column I wrote down how much would it cost me to delegate that to a specialist that's more qualified and does a greater job than I do, not less. That doesn't depend on me, that knows more about it than I do. What would it cost me? Not just their salary, but their space usage, their insurance, their park, everything, Every detail. How much would it cost me? And then what's the spread between what it makes versus what it cost and I reprioritize the spread and I look to now I know what I'm going to be delegating. Now I know I'm going to be able to extracting surplus labor value to make more profit margins. Now I know what I want to be doing. Now I know what's going to produce the most and the last column is how much time do I spend on that next fifth column? How much time do I spend on it? And the last column I reprioritized it according to all those variables. Then I layered it in layers and I took the lowest layer, I put a job description and I hired somebody to do all the lower priority stuff. And it took me three people to get the one person that I'm no longer have to think about it. Then I went to the next layer and it took two people to get that one. I got more efficient at hiring because I made sure I don't ever hire anybody unless their highest value is to do that. Otherwise you're going to micromanage them and push them uphill. And I don't want to do that.

Yeah.

And I kept levitating it by going up the scale, releasing all that weight on my back that was low value stuff, but I could extract income from by hiring people, making a difference. And over the next 18 months I went from a little one person assistant and myself little 970 square foot office to a $5,000 office. Five doctors, 12 staff members making tenfold net profit, I'm sure net profit after taxes, everything. And it's because I prioritized, I delegated and I gave myself permission to do what I'm inspired to do. So I can't wait to give and do it because that raises the energy level and the things that were most productive. And these are the ones that I love doing that produce the most that gave me the most reward and the most pat on the back. Hey, you're on track. And my profit margins changed and My stresses went down and I was freed and I've never gone back. I, I, that's my only, I bet.

Not I don't go back.

I've never done that stuff again.

Yeah, well, all right. So I love, I absolutely love that and there's, there's so much there now I will, I'll argue, I'm going to debate you just a little bit in that I would say that you, myself, a few other folks that I know have a deep passion for personal life mastery. In other words, we started out very early on realizing that if we were going to get anywhere we wanted to go, we had to master self. How important is a relative level of self awareness to a person before they can actually institute your six step plan? In other words, do you have to have a certain level of self awareness to say this? You know, almost, it's almost like I was talking to this on this entrepreneur yesterday. Humble confidence, enough honesty with oneself, transparency to say I, I don't do this well.

Well when I've done this in companies of all different levels and we've had 2,000 employees and 10,000 employees, little groups. So it doesn't matter where you start. What we do is we start with your job description and take a look at where it is and how congruent you are. Nobody goes to work for the sake of a company. They go to work fulfill what they value most. If they can see how that job description and the mission of the company is helping them fulfill what's important to them, they'll be engaged. Yeah. If they can't, they're going to be pushing them uphill and they're going to be expecting breaks and vacations and retirement.

Yeah.

So it doesn't matter where they are. They can do it because I've done it all different scales but the people who are really congruent with the job are more receptive to doing it because they want to move forward. People who are not you may actually realize.

As for the sake of your life, I'm not going to fire you because you're not a great person. You fit over here and this is a square peg and around all let's find out what you love doing and move you in the direction of what you're really inspired to do and you'll excel. The same individual excel somewhere else. Yeah. So sometimes people hire somebody out of desperation and not really care enough about them to make sure that they're inspired to do that job and care enough about the company to make sure they don't waste their time on people that aren't inspired.

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Right?

You know what I'm saying? So, as you can imagine, it was a bit of a poop show for A while. So would you recommend then? All right, so they. So let's say the entrepreneur goes through the six step process. They get super clear on themselves. They get a lot of clarity. They get a lot of direction as a result of that clarity. Would you then say that somehow throughout their hiring formula that they have a discovery mechanism built into how they're hiring folks?

I have that. I have a free on my website. Anybody can use it, any entrepreneur. We have millions of people that use it. It's a value determination process for screening people to know what they're going to be engaged in. Let me share with this goal. I guarantee.

Yeah, please.

So when, when a person comes in, I do a value determination to find out what the hierarchy their values are. I don't. If you ask somebody I've been doing value determinations 45 years, you ask me what their advisor. You ain't going to get the truth.

No, you're not. Well, they don't know. That was my question is. I don't think they know.

No, they don't know. They don't know. If you ask somebody how many of you want to be financially independent, Everybody put their hands, both hands and their feet in the air. But how many of you are actually living in a way that they're buying assets and not blowing their money? That's not small percentage, less than 1%. So what people say they want, what they actually want are not the same. So I had to develop an objective way of identifying what their life demonstrates, not what they say.

Yeah, for sure.

It's a series of questions for one, how do you fill your space? Believe it or not, that's one of the biggest determinants about what you value. Because things that are really, really, really important to you, you keep close to you. Proximal things that aren't, you just discard. So if I gave you a ring of the greatest entrepreneur on the planet that's ever been here, the biggest entrepreneur Bill Gates ring or something like that, you probably put it in your desk and have it in front of you or something. You wouldn't toss it in the trash can? Yeah, anything that represented mastery of entrepreneurship and leadership or whatever. An iconic symbol of that, a nameplate of the greatest business leaders or something, you probably put it right down on your desk where you can see it's. Yeah, you wouldn't throw it in a trash can. It'd be too valuable to you. So whatever you fill your space with, your intimate and personal space most and most consistently engage in is what you value. So in my Case my computer. I'm in front of my computer engaging it 16 hours a day on average. So I'm involved in that because that's my vehicle for teaching, my vehicle for research and writing. So that's the most valuable thing I've got in my, in my space. But you look at what you figure space with. You look at how you spend your time. You make time for things that are important to you. You look at what energizes. You have more energy when you're doing.

Yeah, this energizes me. Like just doing this.

Exactly. Yeah. You can see I'm energized by it.

Yeah.

Then you look at where you spend your money because you, you value things. You put money into it.

Yeah.

Then you look at where you're most ordered and where you're most disciplined and what you are thinking about, visualizing and internally dialogue with your, about, about your life the way you want it. That's showing evidence of coming true. Not fantasies without evidence, but what's coming true.

Yeah.

Then you look at what you want to converse about with the people about and what it is that's the most consistent, persistent goals that you're striving for that are coming true. And what is it you can't wait to feed your mind about, learn about. You probably have a whole library on leadership and business and personal development. You've been powering that stuff. Yeah, but you probably don't have anything on cupcake manufacturing.

No, I do not. Unless one of my entrepreneurs is a cupcake vendor and which I have had happen before. I taught them how to sell more cupcakes.

See, I haven't, I haven't driven a car in 33 plus years. Yeah, I haven't cooked since I was 24. I hire specialists to do everything. I'm anything I need motivation from the outside to do, I hire specialists to do. I don't do it. I got captain and I got, you know, chauffeurs and I got, I even got a clock changer.

I'm still going to get an ass wiper. You know what I mean?

I thought they call that a bidet.

Yeah, but when I go to my girlfriend, I said, look, if I have George Clooney and Brad Pitt, if they make love on my behalf, well, you still love me. She said, I'll love you even more.

I'm delegate, I'm teasing.

But if you're not really honest about what that value is, that's the first step. Before you hire somebody, you need to know what they're committed to. Because that's what they're committed to. Then you need to be really clear and concise on the job description. Not nebulous, not vague in general. Not marketing. That's not a job description.

Yeah.

You have to know what exactly they're going to do. The actual action steps that's expected of them.

Yeah.

And you ask them A simple question, Mrs. Jones, how is doing that action fulfill your top value? If they go.

If they even have to look and pause, it's incongruent. Yeah. But if they, if they, they say I can answer the question fluently, congruently and it's sensible and it's logical. Yeah. You put a check, there's congruency there. You need to check every job description then down to the detail and see how congruent it is with their top values. Top three. If it's not, don't hire them. You're gonna be pushing crap uphill.

Yeah.

But if you, you see that it's congruent, you will not have to think about it. They'll take it and run with it. Yeah, that's what you want.

That is so true. And me thinking, I went through just recently and I've, you know, I've got some fairly successful businesses.

I just hired a brand new cfo and you can tell he's absolutely passionate about finance because that's all, that's all he focuses on. Like he gets lit up when he finds, and I get lit up too when he finds hidden money because you know, he's, he's found money in places that we were just, you know, paying out or whatever. But more importantly, he, he is, he's not just consistent with the financial matters in front of us. He's consistent with the financial matters of what's ahead of us, you know, know, really helping us scale, really help us think. And I, you know, and I've done every single position in my businesses at least once. But I'll also tell the audience as a rule of thumb that while you may get it started, you want to delegate or find an integrator or find someone as soon as possible that can allow you to bandwidth to do what you're really good at. Because I've realized I'm really good at vision, I'm really good at strategy and I'm really good at relationships historically, just building great relationships with great people. And then osmosis sales come. Right. I'm not great at the details. I don't want to be involved in every, every, every checkbox or whatever. I do like financial, I Like being able to see what financial does like, you know, I like my executive dashboards. I want to be able to see what's going on. But I can scan an executive dashboard now in about 15 or 20 minutes, you know, to make sure that I don't, you know, because I've been a victim of embezzlement before, you know, to make sure that I don't have that. Those type of shenanigans going on. I think that's absolutely valuable. Please make sure your team sends us a direct link for that and I'll drop it in the show notes for sure. I want to move on to something else. Really. Actually it's kind of the same thing. It's kind of around.

Dissolution is not the right word. Delusion. I find that sometimes entrepreneurs have a little bit of a delusional value about how long something's going to take and how much effort it's going to require. What can we do to prepare them to really be willing to do the hard work first? Since there is a phase of a little grind and pain early days before you can get into really scaling yourself and scaling your business.

Okay, this goes back to the brain because it's a brain function. When your blood glucose and oxygen goes into the forebrain, you're more objective and your perception of time and strategies are more effective because that's. The executive center does that. It strategizes, mitigates and sets real timeframes. When you're in your amygdala because it's in survival mode and it's trying to capture prey or run away from predator, it has to accelerate the adrenaline to get you to capture the prey or accelerate to get away from the predator. And so it has to subjectively distort reality in order to capture prey and avoid predator. So anytime you're in lower priority things, the blood glucose and oxygen goes in the amygdala and you distort reality. You don't set real goals and you go into pride and you set too big a goal in too short a timeframe or shame and self depreciation. Too long a timeframe and too small a goal and you distort it and you're not present. That's why it's so important to prioritize and delegate. Because the moment you prioritize, stick to priority, your blood glucose and oxygen goes into the highest part of the brain, executive center, core brain, and you're more objective and more strategic and you're not distracted by the emotions and vicissitudes of what goes on. Because you're not. You're delegating that.

Yeah.

That's why it's important to hire the right people to delegate it. So you're free to get focused on the vision. The forebrain is linked up into the visual cortex and it allows you to see the vision. And those that can see the vision can strategize it. And they can put real realistic expectation because they've got the experience. But the people that are in their amygdala will automatically distort things. That. That's why people that gamble, that they think they know the future and then they find out the past, they learn by trial and error instead of learn by strategy. And looking at the intrinsic value of an investment and look at what the mean actually is long term. And those are the people that end up building wealth, not the gamblers. And so when you're gambling and shooting from the hip and going from an amygdala response, as an entrepreneur, you're going to probably have a high volatility and be out of governance.

Yeah. What also makes you think too, that entrepreneurs in general, if they really want to try to find wisdom and confidence, it's going to take consistency. Right. So doing, doing the same things well repeatedly, which includes prioritizing correctly, making sure you got the right leverage points. I was dealing with a young man not too long ago that I coached for probably three years before he ever took action. For three. It took him three years to take the first step and then start actually applying what he was being taught. And from day one to year one, he ended up grossing $300,000 that year just. Just because he started kind of like really focusing on that category of moving forward, doing a lot of the things you're talking about. I want to pivot slightly if it's all right. And just because I, you know, I'm very familiar with your work. I've been student ever since the Secret and, and no John, as Raf and other people.

And.

I want to make sure the audience, especially our, our, our, our Z's and our X's and our Y's and our other other alphabets we're probably working on right now have a really good understanding because obviously you're spitting out gold. This is what you do. You've been doing it for a very long time. You're very consistent with kind of your approach and, and, and you've helped, I don't know, countless people be successful. Talk to me a little bit about your story and how you got to where you are, because I know that, you know, there's a little bit of commonality in kind of our early days kind of things. And that, you know, kind of things weren't always, obviously as succinct and clear as they are now. And I think it would be good for the audience to have a really good understanding about, you know, what made you you. Basically.

When I was born, November 25, 1954, I had some sort of positioning in the womb, I guess, odd. And my hand was turned in and my leg was turned in. So when I. They really didn't pay much attention to it until I tried to stand, stand up and walk. When I did, I kept falling over. So I ended up having to wear braces on my arm and leg to straighten out my arm and leg. And the constraint and the restriction of that when all the other kids are playing and stuff like that, I really think was the perfect thing for me to have as a void to drive the want to be able to be free to travel the world because I've traveled a lot.

I bet you do.

I've traveled over 20 million miles on air and I've sailed, God knows, probably a couple million miles. I've been 22 years living on my ship. So when I stop about it, the world is my home. As far as I'm concerned, I don't live in a little spot. I travel the world all the time. So that had something to do with it. Then I was told in first, about a year and a half old, I had a speech impediment because I wasn't using my mouth properly and had you put strings and buttons in my mouth. And that was the perfect thing because I had a speech impediment. Perfect to be a speaker.

Yeah, right.

Then I got to first grade elementary school and I tried to read and it wasn't working. And the teacher said, well, you're going to go to remedial reading. And then finally I had to wear a dunce cap. So I literally had to wear a dunce cap. Me and Daryl Dalrymple had a dunce cap on it. The teacher said, you stand and look out the window until you decide you're going to read. And no matter what it is, it didn't work. So she brought my parents to the class after class and. And said, I'm afraid your son is not ever going to be able to read or write effective because I wrote backwards and he's got dyslexia and he's. I don't think he's going to be able to read or write or be able to speak properly. Probably won't go very far in life, but he likes to run. Once I got out of my braces at age 4, I just ran everywhere.

I was running.

Yeah, there's Forrest Gump, like. And I just wanted to run. And I was. And my dad, he saw that I had learning problems, so he taught me how to play baseball, just in case. Cause in those days, if you could play a sport, you could get by.

You know you could. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So. So I tried a sport. And that worked until I was 12. I did really well. I was headed for baseball. But then we moved to Richmond, Texas, small town. And there if you struck a guy out, a gang attacked you, and the guy who was the coach was in a car with a girl, kissing, making out, and it wasn't baseball. So I quit baseball. And the only other sport I had was surfing. I learned how to surf when I was nine. And the first day I learned how to stand on a board for some reason. But Texas wasn't the surf capital. So it's 13:13, I decided I left home at 13.

I.

At 14, I hitchhiked to California and down into Mexico. At 15, I panhandled enough money in Huntington Beach, California, at the Surf spot to go to Hawaii. I lived under a bridge. I learned under a bark, a park bench. I lived in a bathroom, an abandoned car. I kept social climbing, and eventually I was in a tent and I was riding big waves in the North Shore of oahu back in 1969. 70, 71, 72. So I was a surfer until I nearly died. I had a real close call with almost dying at 17. And that led me to a health food store, led me to a yoga class. And that's where I met Paul Bragg. In one night, one hour, one man with a message shared with me something that I never heard before, nobody ever told me. He said, what you think about, what you visualize, what you affirm, what you feel and what you take action on changes the course of your destiny. And that you can take command of that no matter what you've been through, no matter what you've gone through, no matter what you're going through, you can take command of that and change your direction. And that was the first night I believed that maybe I could overcome my learning problems and learn how to become somebody who could read and be intelligent someday.

Yeah.

So at 17, I had to dream to overcome my learning problems and become intelligent. And that was a long journey. That wasn't overnight, but that was a long journey. You go in and learn how to read a dictionary and memorize words and pronounce them and spell them. And it was a slow process. Then I went back to school and then I never stopped. I just once I learned how I could read. I now read nearly 31,000 books. And so I've been on a reading curve for 51 years now and that has helped me learn.

Yeah.

And I love sharing. You know, if, you know, if you learn something, you learn it better.

That's right.

So I've been on mission. So since 17 I've been on a mission and at 18 I've been teaching and I've been teaching 50, almost one years and, and anything and everything that can help maximize human awareness potential, particularly in business and in your, your career path, but in any area really because they all work if you go and do really well in business but you have, you know, you're not doing great in your relationship, your health and you're defeating yourself. Yeah. Anything that maximizes human awareness and potential. I've been exploring and studying and trying my best to try to help entrepreneurs and people and leaders and stuff do something amazing with their life.

Yeah, I thank you for sharing that. The reason is, is I want people to fully understand no matter where they are in their journey. Like I really want them to have hope. Right. You know, you had your friend. I had a man by the name of Steve Meyer that changed the course of my, my life. I also deal with dyslexia. I'm also.

Self diagnosed or friendship family diagnosed with adhd. I have the ability to hyper focus or be completely oblivious. You know, and you know, part of what I, why I do what I do nowadays is because I believe that anyone can do anything if they really want to do it right. And, and this journey is exactly.

If it's really high their value, they'll do it.

Yeah, exactly. Talk to me about. Because it seems like at least now I'm be a little personal with you. It seems like at least for me my values have shifted from self to others. So almost everything that I do, even the, from the podcast to creating my live event building to creating the hybrid studios and stuff that we've done to who I associate with, who I try to coach and help all seems to, to. And I had this epiphany not, not too long ago. It all seems to be me doing what Steve Myrick did for me for other people. Like I, I've. I don't want for anything. You know, I have a very nice lifestyle. You know, I'VE fortunately made some good decisions. I've survived most of the bad ones, thank God. You know, but it's like, talk to me a little about like, how do we.

How do we help others kind of do this, this same process and really go on the journey? Because I find that it, there has to be a commitment now to go on the journey. So five years from now, 10 years from now, that they're living the kind of life that they really want to live.

Well, time times intensity gives results. And the more intensely you focus, the less time it takes. But.

We become our true self to the degree that we make everyone else ourself.

When we realize that everybody's a reflection. You know, there's an old biblical statement in Romans 2:1 that says, it says, he who judges others is looking at themselves and judging themselves. For you do the same thing. So what I did is I basically went through there and I realized that I had every trait that I see in people. It's all me. So if I'm not loving them and not appreciating, not caring and not trying to be of service to them, that's a part of me I'm devaluing and disowning and trying to. So once I realize that, then I'm not an altruist where I sacrifice me for them. I'm not a narcissist where I sacrifice them for me. I'm a person that has sustainable, fair exchange. That's the objective. So I can do what I love, helping other people do what they love so we accomplish it. Because if I don't exemplify that, they're not going to be inspired by my story or what I'm doing. So I have that responsibility to empower my life at the same time empower theirs. But the bigger the vision we have, the more impact we have. And we won't have a bigger vision unless we're mastering our own lives. So that's why self mastery is part of helping people amass to theirs. But at the same time, if you don't have a cause bigger than yourself, you won't get beyond yourself. Yeah. Seneca said, you measure an individual by their most distant ends, the magnitude of space and time and their innermost dominant thought will determine the level of conscious evolution they've obtained. So how big a vision do they have? Musk has got a vision to go to Mars. That's a pretty good sized vision. Yeah.

I have a feeling he'll probably do it.

Knowing him. Oh yeah. I have a thousand year goals of how I Want to be perceived a thousand years in the future. And some of those things have already come true. Yeah, I mean, I got to share a story. I was speaking at the Milk Abbey in Austria, and I'd already written a posthumous biography of how I wanted to be perceived, the impact I wanted to have a thousand years from now that I would print into Wikipedia for a thousand years.

And all of a sudden, I had the opportunity to speak at this conference with 12 other people, some Nobel Prize winners, some really sharp people. And at the end of the speeches, they brought us in this library, this beautiful milk library there, fantastic library. And this looked like it was like the Sistine Chapel. And they lined us up in a semicircle and gave us the stainless steel cylinder with 365 quotations and the Demartini method on conflict resolution, which is what I was presenting calligraphy on this beautiful scroll with gold leaf. I mean, it was beautiful. And it was sealed and air tied it into a stainless steel cylinder. And we witnessed pre session down at the back end of the library into this infinity of divinity library shelf room opened up this big vault. Walked in there and it says, 12 Foot Infinity Divinity library shelf. And we got to stick our cylinders in there to be held in that room for a thousand years.

Oh, that's so cool.

I am absolutely certain now that my work will be remembered a thousand years from now, because it's that rhythm. So I'm a firm believer that, that you say we're immortal souls, but are we actually setting immortal goals? Are we actually setting goals that are beyond space and time of our mortal self? Because the bigger our goals like that, and the more we chunk them down into the action steps, the bigger the impact we have on this planet.

Yeah, no, I love that. In fact, I was. I was telling people, I've been telling people a long time that to me, the greatest legacy you'll ever make will be the one that outlives you. It's kind of in that same framework. And I got. And I can't. I discovered that kind of mindset when I real. When I first stepped foot on stage. And I would watch, I would tell a story and I would, you know, obviously you give, you know, action items and points, but I would. I would get on stage, you know, about a third of the audience would be moved to tears and laughter and stuff like that. For me, just sharing the story about how this. This man that no one in the world knew about, name Steve Mark, change my trajectory in my life. And then I realized that every single time that I step on stage or step in front of a camera or a podcast. Anytime I mention his name and any elements of kind of how he helped me change, he is, he passed away in 2003, you know, and his legacy is continuing through me, you know, so it's that same kind of mindset which I think is really powerful. I want to come back to something else you just said, because I think this is, this is vital in a world that's full of narcissism especially I think, I think social media in many respects has intensified it because, you know, that's how people pay attention to you in some cases. Talk to me a little about the sustainable exchange because I, if I'm being honest, there are times that I've been very self focused. There's been times I've been a pushover and I feel like I'm operating in manifested flow nowadays in that I, I, I give to an extent and I receive from an extent.

It's like a rocket. When it first takes off, it's a little wobbly and then it's steady. And that's the way we do in life. We, we go, well, you know, when I first opened up my business, I was very altruistic and making everybody happy and everything else. And then I finally went and I said, you know, wait a minute, what's in for me here? And then I went extreme, where I go, you know, gestapo, you know, my way or the, yeah, one of those get you anywhere, right? 1. If you get cocky and narcissistic, you get humbled because you're not meeting the people's needs and the employees need needs and they end up getting a Teamsters union to fight you, to bring you back down or make a customer leave you and the stockholders get, withdraw their money and then you get humbled or you're altruistically sacrificing your profits. Neither one of those gets you anywhere. Eventually you say, damn it, I'm worth more than that, you know, and you go back up. So nature's giving all the symptoms in a business are nothing more than feedback mechanisms to get you authentic bottom line. It's getting you to be authentic, live by your highest value, be most objective, delegate the highest priority things to other people that are not yours, and get on with the highest priority things that are yours. All the symptoms of doing that. But sustainable fair exchange is when you're not narcissistic trying to get something for nothing, not altruistic trying to give something for nothing, but you're caring enough about yourself and caring enough about the people you care about, which are all employees, customers, stockholders, shareholders, everybody. Even the ecology, anybody that you. It's wise to care about. If you can find a win win between all them, you're on your way to having a magnificent business. But if you try to get something for nothing or give something for nothing, you'll just get the symptoms that it creates to teach you to go back to having a fair exchange.

Dr. J. I could talk to you for days, weeks, and years. I. I absolutely love you, brother. I can't thank you enough for coming on the show big time. Where can everybody find out more about the demartini method? Because I think that they. Everybody should do a deep dive.

Well, the. All you have to do is go to drdmartini.com and on there's the Dr. Demartini show for the podcast kind of stuff. Or they just go on and just browse the website because there's not stuff to keep busy for lots of 4,000 years. Yeah, you. You're gonna. Even though, look, you know, you could be a Christian, but you're gonna need to be a Buddhist for one thing, because it's gonna take you more than one lifetime to get through just my website. Got too much stuff on there. But, but the point is that thousands. I've done probably 9,000 interviews over the last few years, and they're all on there. You can go through and look at all this information and save yourself a fortune on education, but take advantage of the website because it's just loaded with great ideas. I know. I've been, I've been. I've been doing this 51 years and, you know, you pick up a few things along the way. At least a few. And you.

There's got to be at least one good idea there.

One good idea.

Yeah.

I asked people at the end of my program, the Breakthrough Experience, which was my signature program, how many of you learned something this weekend that you could have gone your whole life without learning? Every hand goes up.

Yeah.

So I feel pretty confident that there'll be something there. Just like when you do a podcast, you know you've learned certain things and you know you want to share it because you know it make a difference. You know, if you do, you're fulfilled and they grow and everybody wins. And that's the most fulfilling thing we get to do every day.

Absolutely. Well, make sure we link it all in the show notes and all that good stuff for everybody. But, man, thank you so much for coming on the show. I greatly appreciate it. This has been a massive blessing, and I know. I know the audience is gonna love it.

Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. You're helping me fulfill my mission, so thank you.

I hope you liked that video. And if you did, make sure you check out this next video right here. I care deeply that people actually take action with the content I create. Action creates clarity, clarity creates results.

And so it's not enough for me to people read my book and think, that's a good book.

Good job, Amy. Nothing is going to come of that.